hegel, georg - philosophy of mind

PHILOSOPHY OF MINDG.W.F. Hegel

Table of ContentsPHILOSOPHY OF MIND .................................................................................................................................1

G.W.F. Hegel...........................................................................................................................................1INTRODUCTION ..................................................................................................................................1

SECTION ONE − MIND SUBJECTIVE ............................................................................................................4SUB−SECTION A. ANTHROPOLOGY, THE SOUL .........................................................................4SUB−SECTION B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS ....................................18SUB−SECTION C. PSYCHOLOGY, MIND ......................................................................................24

SECTION TWO: MIND OBJECTIVE .............................................................................................................41A. LAW(1).............................................................................................................................................43B. THE MORALITY OF CONSCIENCE(1) .......................................................................................45 C. THE MORAL LIFE, OR SOCIAL ETHICS(1)..............................................................................48

SECTION THREE: ABSOLUTE MIND(1) .....................................................................................................66A. ART ..................................................................................................................................................67B. REVEALED RELIGION(1).............................................................................................................69C. PHILOSOPHY ................................................................................................................................71

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

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PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

G.W.F. Hegel

Translated by William Wallace

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INTRODUCTION • SECTION ONE − MIND SUBJECTIVE •

SUB−SECTION A. ANTHROPOLOGY, THE SOUL • SUB−SECTION B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS • SUB−SECTION C. PSYCHOLOGY, MIND •

SECTION TWO: MIND OBJECTIVE • A. LAW(1)• B. THE MORALITY OF CONSCIENCE(1) • C. THE MORAL LIFE, OR SOCIAL ETHICS(1)•

SECTION THREE: ABSOLUTE MIND(1) • A. ART • B. REVEALED RELIGION(1)• C. PHILOSOPHY •

Part Three of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences

INTRODUCTION

¤ 377 The knowledge of Mind is the highest and hardest, just because it is the most 'concrete' of sciences. Thesignificance of that 'absolute' commandment, Know thyself − whether we look at it in itself or under thehistorical circumstances of its first utterance − is not to promote mere self−knowledge in respect of theparticular capacities, character, propensities, and foibles of the single self. The knowledge it commandsmeans that of man's genuine reality − of what is essentially and ultimately true and real − of mind as the trueand essential being. Equally little is it the purport of mental philosophy to teach what is called knowledge ofmen − the knowledge whose aim is to detect the peculiarities, passions, and foibles of other men, and lay barewhat are called the recesses of the human heart. Information of this kind is, for one thing, meaningless, unlesson the assumption that we know the universal − man as man, and, that always must be, as mind. And foranother, being only engaged with casual, insignificant, and untrue aspects of mental life, it fails to reach theunderlying essence of them all − the mind itself.

¤ 378 Pneumatology, or, as it was also called, Rational Psychology, has been already alluded to in theIntroduction to the Logic as an abstract and generalizing metaphysic of the subject. Empirical (or inductive)psychology, on the other hand, deals with the 'concrete' mind: and, after the revival of the sciences, whenobservation and experience had been made the distinctive methods for the study of concrete reality, suchpsychology was worked on the same lines as other sciences. In this way it came about that the metaphysicaltheory was kept outside the inductive science, and so prevented from getting any concrete embodiment ordetail: whilst at the same time the inductive science clung to the conventional common− sense metaphysicswith its analysis into forces, various activities, etc., and rejected any attempt at a 'speculative' treatment.

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The books of Aristotle on the Soul, along with his discussions on its special aspects and states, are for thisreason still by far the most admirable, perhaps even the sole, work of philosophical value on this topic. Themain aim of a philosophy of mind can only be to reintroduce unity of idea and principle into the theory ofmind, and so reinterpret the lesson of those Aristotelian books.

¤ 379 Even our own sense of the mind's living unity naturally protests against any attempt to break it up intodifferent faculties, forces, or, what comes to the same thing, activities, conceived as independent of eachother. But the craving for a comprehension of the unity is still further stimulated, as we soon come acrossdistinctions between mental freedom and mental determinism, antitheses between free psychic agency andthe corporeity that lies external to it, whilst we equally note the intimate interdependence of the one upon theother. In modern times especially the phenomena of animal magnetism have given, even in experience, alively and visible confirmation of the underlying unity of soul, and of the power of its 'ideality'. Before thesefacts, the rigid distinctions of practical common sense are struck with confusion; and the necessity of a'speculative' examination with a view to the removal of difficulties is more directly forced upon the student.

¤ 380 The 'concrete' nature of mind involves for the observer the peculiar difficulty that the several gradesand special types which develop its intelligible unity in detail are not left standing as so many separateexistences confronting its more advanced aspects. It is otherwise in external nature. There, matter andmovement, for example, have a manifestation all their own − it is the solar system; and similarly thedifferentiae of sense−perception have a sort of earlier existence in the properties of bodies, and still moreindependently in the four elements. The species and grades of mental evolution, on the contrary, lose theirseparate existence and become factors, states, and features in the higher grades of development. As aconsequence of this, a lower and more abstract aspect of mind betrays the presence in it, even to experience,of a higher grade. Under the guise of sensation, for example, we may find the very highest mental life as itsmodification or its embodiment. And so sensation, which is but a mere form and vehicle, may to thesuperficial glance seem to be the proper seat and, as it were, the source of those moral and religious principleswith which it is charged; and the moral and religious principles thus modified may seem to call for treatmentas species of sensation. But at the same time, when lower grades of mental life are under examination, itbecomes necessary, if we desire to point to actual cases of them in experience, to direct attention to moreadvanced grades for which they are mere forms. In this way subjects will be treated of by anticipation whichproperly belong to later stages of development (e.g. in dealing with natural awaking from sleep we speak byanticipation of consciousness, or in dealing with mental derangement we must speak of intellect).

What Mind (or Spirit) is

¤ 381 From our point of view mind has for its presupposition Nature, of which it is the truth, and for thatreason its absolute prius. In this its truth Nature is vanished, and mind has resulted as the 'Idea' entered onpossession of itself. Here the subject and object of the Idea are one − either is the intelligent unity, the notion.This identity is absolute negativity −for whereas in Nature the intelligent unity has its objectivity perfect butexternalized, this self−externalization has been nullified and the unity in that way been made one and thesame with itself. Thus at the same time it is this identity only so far as it is a return out of nature.

¤ 382 For this reason the essential, but formally essential, feature of mind is Liberty: i.e. it is the notion'sabsolute negativity or self−identity. Considered as this formal aspect, it may withdraw itself from everythingexternal and from its own externality, its very existence; it can thus submit to infinite pain, the negation of itsindividual immediacy: in other words, it can keep itself affirmative in this negativity and possess its ownidentity. All this is possible so long as it is considered in its abstract self−contained universality.

¤ 383 This universality is also its determinate sphere of being. Having a being of its own, the universal isself−particularizing, whilst it still remains self−identical. Hence the special mode of mental being is'manifestation'. The spirit is not some one mode or meaning which finds utterance or externality only in a

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form distinct from itself: it does not manifest or reveal something, but its very mode and meaning is thisrevelation. And thus in its mere possibility mind is at the same moment an infinite, 'absolute', actuality.

¤ 384 Revelation, taken to mean the revelation of the abstract Idea, is an unmediated transition to Naturewhich comes to be. As mind is free, its manifestation is to set forth Nature as its world; but because it isreflection, it, in thus setting forth its world, at the same time presupposes the world as a nature independentlyexisting. In the intellectual sphere to reveal is thus to create a world as its being − a being in which the mindprocures the affirmation and truth of its freedom.

The Absolute is Mind (Spirit) − this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and tograsp its meaning and burden was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: itwas the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science: and it is this impulse that must explainthe history of the world. The word 'Mind' (Spirit) − and some glimpse of its meaning − was found at an earlyperiod: and the spirituality of God is the lesson of Christianity. It remains for philosophy in its own elementof intelligible unity to get hold of what was thus given as a mental image, and what implicitly is the ultimatereality; and that problem is not genuinely, and by rational methods, solved so long as liberty and intelligibleunity is not the theme and the soul of philosophy.

Subdivision

¤ 385 The development of Mind (Spirit) is in three stages:

(1) In the form of self−relation: within it it has the ideal totality of the Idea − i.e. it has before it all that itsnotion contains: its being is to be self−contained and free. This is Mind Subjective.

(2) In the form of reality: realized, i.e. in a world produced and to be produced by it: in this world freedompresents itself under the shape of necessity. This is Mind Objective.

(3) In that unity of mind as objectivity and of mind as ideality and concept, which essentially and actually isand for ever produces itself, mind in its absolute truth. This is Mind Absolute.

¤ 386 The two first parts of the doctrine of Mind embrace the finite mind. Mind is the infinite Idea, andfinitude here means the disproportion between the concept and the reality − but with the qualification that it isa shadow cast by the mind's own light − a show or illusion which the mind implicitly imposes as a barrier toitself, in order, by its removal, actually to realize and become conscious of freedom as its very being, i.e. tobe fully manifested. The several steps of this activity, on each of which, with their semblance of being, it isthe function of the finite mind to linger, and through which it has to pass, are steps in its liberation. In the fulltruth of that liberation is given the identification of the three stages − finding a world presupposed before us,generating a world as our own creation, and gaining freedom from it and in it. To the infinite form of thistruth the show purifies itself till it becomes a consciousness of it.

A rigid application of the category of finitude by the abstract logician is chiefly seen in dealing with Mindand reason: it is held not a mere matter of strict logic, but treated also as a moral and religious concern, toadhere to the point of view of finitude, and the wish to go further is reckoned a mark of audacity, if not ofinsanity, of thought. Whereas in fact such a modesty of thought, as treats the finite as something altogetherfixed and absolute, is the worst of virtues; and to stick to a post which has no sound ground in itself is themost unsound sort of theory. The category of finitude was at a much earlier period elucidated and explainedat its place in the Logic: an elucidation which, as in logic for the more specific though still simplethought−forms of finitude, so in the rest of philosophy for the concrete forms, has merely to show that thefinite is not, i.e. is not the truth, but merely a transition and an emergence to something higher. This finitudeof the spheres so far examined is the dialectic that makes a thing have its cessation by another and in another:

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but Spirit, the intelligent unity and the implicit Eternal, is itself just the consummation of that internal act bywhich nullity is nullified and vanity is made vain. And so, the modesty alluded to is a retention of this vanity− the finite − in opposition to the true: it is itself therefore vanity. In the course of the mind's development weshall see this vanity appear as wickedness at that turning−point at which mind has reached its extremeimmersion in its subjectivity and its most central contradiction.

SECTION ONE − MIND SUBJECTIVE

¤ 387 Mind, on the ideal stage of its development, is mind as cognitive. Cognition, however, being taken herenot as a merely logical category of the Idea (¤ 223), but in the sense appropriate to the concrete mind.

Subjective mind is: (A) Immediate or implicit: a soul − the Spirit in Nature − the object treated byAnthropology. (B) Mediate or explicit: still as identical reflection into itself and into other things: mind incorrelation or particularization: consciousness − the object treated by the Phenomenology of Mind. (C) Minddefining itself in itself, as an independent subject − the object treated by Psychology.

In the Soul is the awaking of Consciousness: Consciousness sets itself up as Reason, awaking at one bound tothe sense of its rationality: and this Reason by its activity emancipates itself to objectivity and theconsciousness of its intelligent unity.

For an intelligible unity or principle of comprehension each modification it presents is an advance ofdevelopment: and so in mind every character under which it appears is a stage in a process of specificationand development, a step forward towards its goal, in order to make itself into, and to realize in itself, what itimplicitly is. Each step, again, is itself such a process, and its product is that what the mind was implicitly atthe beginning (and so for the observer) it is for itself − for the special form, viz. which the mind has in thatstep. The ordinary method of psychology is to narrate what the mind or soul is, what happens to it, what itdoes. The soul is presupposed as a ready−made agent, which displays such features as its acts and utterances,from which we can learn what it is, what sort of faculties and powers it possesses − all without being awarethat the act and utterance of what the soul is really invests it with that character in our conception and makesit reach a higher stage of being than it explicitly had before.

We must, however, distinguish and keep apart from the progress here to be studied what we call educationand instruction. The sphere of education is the individuals only: and its aim is to bring the universal mind toexist in them. But in the philosophic theory of mind, mind is studied as self−instruction and self−education invery essence; and its acts and utterances are stages in the process which brings it forward to itself, links it inunity with itself, and so makes it actual mind.

SUB−SECTION A. ANTHROPOLOGY, THE SOUL

(a) The Physical Soul (a) Physical Qualities (b) Physical Alterations (c) Sensibility (b) The Feeling Soul (a) The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy (b) Self−feeling (c) Habit (c) The Actual Soul

A. ANTHROPOLOGY

THE SOUL

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

SECTION ONE − MIND SUBJECTIVE 4

¤ 388 Spirit (Mind) came into being as the truth of Nature. But not merely is it, as such a result, to be held thetrue and real first of what went before: this becoming or transition bears in the sphere of the notion the specialmeaning of 'free judgement'. Mind, thus come into being, means therefore that Nature in its own self realizesits untruth and sets itself aside: it means that Mind presupposes itself no longer as the universality which incorporal individuality is always self−externalized, but as a universality which in its concretion and totality isone and simple. At such a stage it is not yet mind, but soul.

¤ 389 The soul is no separate immaterial entity. Wherever there is Nature, the soul is its universalimmaterialism, its simple 'ideal' life. Soul is the substance or 'absolute' basis of all the particularizing andindividualizing of mind: it is in the soul that mind finds the material on which its character is wrought, andthe soul remains the pervading, identical ideality of it all. But as it is still conceived thus abstractly, the soulis only the sleep of mind − the passive of Aristotle, which is potentially all things.

The question of the immateriality of the soul has no interest, except where, on the one hand, matter isregarded as something true, and mind conceived as a thing, on the other. But in modern times even thephysicists have found matters grow thinner in their hands: they have come upon imponderable matters, likeheat, light, etc., to which they might perhaps add space and time. These 'imponderables', which have lost theproperty (peculiar to matter) of gravity and, in a sense, even the capacity of offering resistance, have still,however, a sensible existence and outness of part to part; whereas the 'vital' matter, which may also be foundenumerated among them, not merely lacks gravity, but even every other aspect of existence which might leadus to treat it as material.

The fact is that in the Idea of Life the self−externalism of nature is implicitly at an end: subjectivity is thevery substance and conception of life − with this proviso, however, that its existence or objectivity is still atthe same time forfeited to the away of self−externalism. It is otherwise with Mind. There, in the intelligibleunity which exists as freedom, as absolute negativity, and not as the immediate or natural individual, theobject or the reality of the intelligible unity is the unity itself; and so the self−externalism, which is thefundamental feature of matter, has been completely dissipated and transmuted into universality, or thesubjective ideality of the conceptual unity. Mind is the existent truth of matter − the truth that matter itself hasno truth.

A cognate question is that of the community of soul and body. This community (interdependence) wasassumed as a fact, and the only problem was how to comprehend it. The usual answer, perhaps, was to call itan incomprehensible mystery; and, indeed, if we take them to be absolutely antithetical and absolutelyindependent, they are as impenetrable to each other as one piece of matter to another, each being supposed tobe found only in the pores of the other, i.e. where the other is not − whence Epicurus, when attributing to thegods a residence in the pores, was consistent in not imposing on them any connection with the world. Asomewhat different answer has been given by all philosophers since this relation came to be expresslydiscussed. Descartes, Malebranche, Spinoza, and Leibniz have all indicated God as this nexus. They meantthat the finitude of soul and matter were only ideal and unreal distinctions; and, so holding, therephilosophers took God, not, as so often is done, merely as another word for the incomprehensible, but ratheras the sole true identity of finite mind and matter. But either this identity, as in the case of Spinoza, is tooabstract, or, as in the case of Leibniz, though his Monad of monads brings things into being, it does so onlyby an act of judgement or choice. Hence, with Leibniz, the result is a distinction between soul and thecorporeal (or material), and the identity is only like the copula of a judgement, and does not rise or developinto system, into the absolute syllogism.

¤ 390 The Soul is at first − (a) In its immediate natural mode − the natural soul, which only is. (b) Secondly,it is a soul which feels, as individualized, enters into correlation with its immediate being, and, in the modesof that being, retains an abstract independence. (c) Thirdly, its immediate being − or corporeity − is mouldedinto it, and with that corporeity it exists as actual soul.

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(a) THE PHYSICAL SOUL(1)

¤ 391 The soul universal, described, it may be, as an anima mundi, a world−soul, must not be fixed on thataccount as a single subject; it is rather the universal substance which has its actual truth only in individualsand single subjects. Thus, when it presents itself as a single soul, it is a single soul which is merely: its onlymodes are modes of natural life. These have, so to speak, behind its ideality a free existence: i.e. they arenatural objects for consciousness, but objects to which the soul as such does not behave as to somethingexternal. These features rather are physical qualities of which it finds itself possessed.

(a) Physical Qualities(2)

¤ 392 (1) While still a 'substance' (i.e. a physical soul) the mind takes part in the general planetary life, feelsthe difference of climates, the changes of the seasons, and the periods of the day, etc. This life of nature forthe main shows itself only in occasional strain or disturbance of mental tone.

In recent times a good deal has been said of the cosmical, sidereal, and telluric life of man. In such asympathy with nature the animals essentially live: their specific characters and their particular phases ofgrowth depend, in many cases completely, and always more or less, upon it. In the case of man these pointsof dependence lose importance, just in proportion to his civilization, and the more his whole frame of soul isbased upon a sub−structure of mental freedom. The history of the world is not bound up with revolutions inthe solar system, any more than the destinies of individuals with the positions of the planets.

The difference of climate has a more solid and vigorous influence. But the response to the changes of theseasons and hours of the day is found only in faint changes of mood, which come expressly to the fore only inmorbid states (including insanity) and at periods when the self−conscious life suffers depression.

In nations less intellectually emancipated, which therefore live more in harmony with nature, we find amidtheir superstitions and aberrations of imbecility a few real cases of such sympathy, and on that foundationwhat seems to be marvellous prophetic vision of coming conditions and of events arising therefrom. But asmental freedom gets a deeper hold, even these few and slight susceptibilities, based upon participation in thecommon life of nature, disappear. Animals and plants, on the contrary, remain for ever subject to suchinfluences.

¤ 393 (2) According to the concrete differences of the terrestrial globe, the general planetary life of thenature−governed mind specializes itself and breaks up into the several nature−governed minds which, on thewhole, give expression to the nature of the geographical continents and constitute the diversities of race.

The contrast between the earth's poles, the land towards the north pole being more aggregated andpreponderant over sea, whereas in the southern hemisphere it runs out in sharp points, widely distant fromeach other, introduces into the differences of continents a further modification which Treviranus (Biology,Part II) has exhibited in the case of the flora and fauna.

¤ 394 This diversity descends into specialities, that may be termed local minds − shown in the outwardmodes of life and occupation, bodily structure and disposition, but still more in the inner tendency andcapacity of the intellectual and moral character of the several peoples.

Back to the very beginnings of national history we see the several nations each possessing a persistent type ofits own.

¤ 395 (3) The soul is further de−universalized into the individualized subject. But this subjectivity is hereonly considered as a differentiation and singling out of the modes which nature gives; we find it as the special

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temperament, talent, character, physiognomy, or other disposition and idiosyncrasy, of families or singleindividuals.

(b) Physical Alterations

¤ 396 Taking the soul as an individual, we find its diversities, as alterations in it, the one permanent subject,and as stages in its development. As they are at once physical and mental diversities, a more concretedefinition or description of them would require us to anticipate an acquaintance with the formed and maturedmind.

(1) The first of these is the natural lapse of the ages in man's life. He begins with Childhood − mind wrappedup in itself. His next step is the fully developed antithesis, the strain and struggle of a universality which isstill subjective (as seen in ideals, fancies, hopes, ambitions) against his immediate individuality. And thatindividuality marks both the world which, as it exists, fails to meet his ideal requirements, and the position ofthe individual himself, who is still short of independence and not fully equipped for the part he has to play(Youth). Thirdly, we see man in his true relation to his environment, recognizing the objective necessity andreasonableness of the world as he finds it − a world no longer incomplete, but able in the work which itcollectively achieves to afford the individual a place and a security for his performance. By his share in thiscollective work he first is really somebody, gaining an effective existence and an objective value (Manhood).Last of all comes the finishing touch to this unity with objectivity: a unity which, while on its realist side itpasses into the inertia of deadening habit, on its idealist side gains freedom from the limited interests andentanglements of the outward present (Old Age).

¤ 397 (2) Next we find the individual subject to a real antithesis, leading it to seek and find itself in anotherindividual. This − the sexual relation − on a physical basis, shows, on its one side, subjectivity remaining inan instinctive and emotional harmony of moral life and love, and not pushing these tendencies to an extremeuniversal phase, in purposes political, scientific, or artistic; and on the other, shows an active half, where theindividual is the vehicle of a struggle of universal and objective interests with the given conditions (both ofhis own existence and of that of the external world), carrying out these universal principles into a unity withthe world which is his own work. The sexual tie acquires its moral and spiritual significance and function inthe family.

¤ 398 (3) When the individuality, or self−centralized being, distinguishes itself from its mere being, thisimmediate judgement is the waking of the soul, which confronts its self−absorbed natural life, in the firstinstance, as one natural quality and state confronts another state, viz. sleep. − The waking is not merely forthe observer, or externally distinct from the sleep: it is itself the judgement (primary partition) of theindividual soul − which is self−existing only as it relates its self−existence to its mere existence,distinguishing itself from its still undifferentiated universality. The waking state includes generally allself−conscious and rational activity in which the mind realizes its own distinct self. − Sleep is an invigorationof this activity − not as a merely negative rest from it, but as a return back from the world of specialization,from dispersion into phases where it has grown hard and stiff − a return into the general nature ofsubjectivity, which is the substance of those specialized energies and their absolute master.

The distinction between sleep and waking is one of those posers, as they may be called, which are oftenaddressed to philosophy: − Napoleon, for example, on a visit to the University of Pavia, put this question tothe class of ideology. The characterization given in the section is abstract; it primarily treats waking merelyas a natural fact, containing the mental element implicate but not yet as invested with a special being of itsown. If we are to speak more concretely of this distinction (in fundamentals it remains the same), we musttake the self−existence of the individual soul in its higher aspects as the Ego of consciousness and asintelligent mind. The difficulty raised anent the distinction of the two states properly arises, only when wealso take into account the dreams in sleep and describe these dreams, as well as the mental representations in

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the sober waking consciousness under one and the same title of mental representations. Thus superficiallyclassified as states of mental representation the two coincide, because we have lost sight of the difference;and in the case of any assignable distinction of waking consciousness, we can always return to the trivialremark that all this is nothing more than mental idea. But the concrete theory of the wakin soul in its realizedbeing views it as consciousness and intellect: and the world of intelligent consciousness is something quitedifferent from a picture of mere ideas and images. The latter are in the main only externally conjoined, in anunintelligent way, by the laws of the so−called Association of Ideas; though here and there of course logicalprinciples may also be operative. But in the waking state man behaves essentially as a concrete ego, anintelligence: and because of this intelligence his sense−perception stands before him as a concrete totality offeatures in which each member, each point, takes up its place as at the same time determined through andwith all the rest. Thus the facts embodied in his sensation are authenticated, not by his mere subjectiverepresentation and distinction of the facts as something external from the person, but by virtue of the concreteinterconnection in which each part stands with all parts of this complex. The waking state is the concreteconsciousness of this mutual corroboration of each single factor of its content by all the others in the pictureas perceived. The consciousness of this interdependence need not be explicit and distinct. Still this generalsetting to all sensations is implicitly present in the concrete feeling of self. − In order to see the differencebetween dreaming and waking we need only keep in view the Kantian distinction between subjectivity andobjectivity of mental representation (the latter depending upon determination through categories):remembering, as already noted, that what is actually present in mind need not be therefore explicitly realizedin consciousness, just as little as the exaltation of the intellectual sense to God need stand beforeconsciousness in the shape of proofs of God's existence, although, as before explained, these proofs onlyserve to express the net worth and content of that feeling.

(c) Sensibility(3)

¤ 399 Sleep and waking are, primarily, it is true, not mere alterations, but alternating conditions (aprogression in infinitum). This is their formal and negative relationship: but in it the affirmative relationshipis also involved. In the self−certified existence of waking soul its mere existence is implicit as an 'ideal'factor: the features which make up its sleeping nature, where they are implicitly as in their substance, arefound by the waking soul, in its own self, and, be it noted, for itself. The fact that these particulars, though asa mode of mind they are distinguished from the self− identity of our self−centred being, are yet simplycontained in its simplicity, is what we call sensibility.

¤ 400 Sensibility (feeling) is the form of the dull stirring, the inarticulate breathing, of the spirit through itsunconscious and unintelligent individuality, where every definite feature is still 'immediate' − neitherspecially developed in its content nor set in distinction as objective to subject, but treated as belonging to itsmost special, its natural peculiarity. The content of sensation is thus limited and transient, belonging as itdoes to natural, immediate being − to what is therefore qualitative and finite.

Everything is in sensation (feeling): if you will, everything that emerges in conscious intelligence and inreason has its source and origin in sensation; for source and origin just means the first immediate manner inwhich a thing appears. Let it not be enough to have principles and religion only in the head: they must also bein the heart, in the feeling. What we merely have in the head is in consciousness, in a general way: the factsof it are objective − set over against consciousness, so that as it is put in me (my abstract ego) it can also bekept away and apart from me (from my concrete subjectivity). But if put in the feeling, the fact is a mode ofmy individuality, however crude that individuality be in such a form: it is thus treated as my very own. Myown is something inseparate from the actual concrete self: and this immediate unity of the soul with itsunderlying self in all its definite content is just this inseparability; which, however, yet falls short of the egoof developed consciousness, and still more of the freedom of rational mind−life. It is with a quite differentintensity and permanency that the will, the conscience, and the character, are our very own, than can ever betrue of feeling and of the group of feelings (the heart): and this we need no philosophy to tell us. No doubt it

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is correct to say that above everything the heart must be good. But feeling and heart is not the form by whichanything is legitimated as religious, moral, true, just, etc., and an appeal to heart and feeling either meansnothing or means something bad. This should hardly need enforcing. Can any experience be more trite thanthat feelings and hearts are also bad, evil, godless, mean, etc.? That the heart is the source only of suchfeelings is stated in the words: 'From the heart proceed evil thoughts, murder, adultery, fornication,blasphemy, etc.' In such times when 'scientific' theology and philosophy make the heart and feeling thecriterion of what is good, moral, and religious, it is necessary to remind them of these trite experiences; justas it is nowadays necessary to repeat that thinking is the characteristic property by which man is distinguishedfrom the beasts, and that he has feeling in common with them.

¤ 401 What the sentient soul finds within it is, on one hand, the naturally immediate, as 'ideally' in it andmade its own. On the other hand and conversely, what originally belongs to the central individuality (whichas further deepened and enlarged is the conscious ego and free mind) gets the features of the naturalcorporeity, and is so felt. In this way we have two spheres of feeling. One, where what at first is a corporealaffection (e.g. of the eye or of any bodily part whatever) is made feeling (sensation) by being driven inward,memorized in the soul's self−centred part. Another, where affections originating in the mind and belonging toit, are in order to be felt, and to be as if found, invested with corporeity. Thus the mode or affection gets aplace in the subject: it is felt in the soul. The detailed specification of the former branch of sensibility is seenin the system of the senses. But the other or inwardly originated modes of feeling no less necessarilysystematize themselves; and their corporization, as put in the living and concretely developed natural being,works itself out, following the special character of the mental mode, in a special system of bodily organs.

Sensibility in general is the healthy fellowship of the individual mind in the life of its bodily part. The sensesform the simple system of corporeity specified. (a) The 'ideal' side of physical things breaks up into two −because in it, as immediate and not yet subjective ideality, distinction appears as mere variety − the senses ofdefinite light, (¤ 317) − and of sound, (¤ 300). The 'real' aspect similarly is with its difference double: (b) thesenses of smell and taste, (¤¤ 321, 322); (c) the sense of solid reality, of heavy matter, of heat (¤ 303) andshape (¤ 310). Around the centre of the sentient individuality these specifications arrange themselves moresimply than when they are developed in the natural corporeity.

The system by which the internal sensation comes to give itself specific bodily forms would deserve to betreated in detail in a peculiar science − a psychical physiology. Somewhat pointing to such a system isimplied in the feeling of the appropriateness or inappropriateness of an immediate sensation to the persistenttone of internal sensibility (the pleasant and unpleasant): as also in the distinct parallelism which underliesthe symbolical employment of sensations, e.g. of colours, tones, smells. But the most interesting side of apsychical physiology would lie in studying not the mere sympathy, but more definitely the bodily formadopted by certain mental modifications, especially the passions or emotions. We should have, for example,to explain the line of connection by which anger and courage are felt in the breast, the blood, the 'irritable'system, just as thinking and mental occupation are felt in the head, the centre of the 'sensible' system. Weshould want a more satisfactory explanation than hitherto of the most familar connections by which tears, andvoice in general, with its varieties of language, laughter, sighs, with many other specializations lying in theline of pathognomy and physiognomy, are formed from their mental source. In physiology the viscera and theorgans are treated merely as parts subservient to the animal organism; but they form at the same time aphysical system for the expression of mental states, and in this way they get quite another interpretation.

¤ 402 Sensations, just because they are immediate and are found existing, are single and transient aspects ofpsychic life − alterations in the substantiality of the soul, set in its self−centred life, with which that substanceis one. But this self−centred being is not merely a formal factor of sensation: the soul is virtually a reflectedtotality of sensations − it feels in itself the total substantiality which it virtually is − it is a soul which feels.

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In the usage of ordinary language, sensation and feeling are not clearly distinguished: still we do not speak ofthe sensation − but of the feeling (sense) of right, of self; sentimentality (sensibility) is connected withsensation: we may therefore say sensation emphasizes rather the side of passivity−the fact that we findourselves feeling, i.e. the immediacy of mode in feeling − whereas feeling at the same time rather notes thefact that it is we ourselves who feel.

(b) THE FEELING SOUL − (SOUL AS SENTIENCY)(4)

¤ 403 The feeling or sentient individual is the simple 'ideality' or subjective side of sensation. What it has todo, therefore, is to raise its substantiality, its merely virtual filling−up, to the character of subjectivity, to takepossession of it, to realize its mastery over its own. As sentient, the soul is no longer a mere natural, but aninward, individuality: the individuality which in the merely substantial totality was only formal to it has to beliberated and made independent.

Nowhere so much as in the case of the soul (and still more of the mind) if we are to understand it, must thatfeature of 'ideality' be kept in view, which represents it as the negation of the real, but a negation, where thereal is put past, virtually retained, although it does not exist. The feature is one with which we are familiar inregard to our mental ideas or to memory. Every individual is an infinite treasury of sensations, ideas, acquiredlore, thoughts, etc.; and yet the ego is one and uncompounded, a deep featureless characterless mine, in whichall this is stored up, without existing. It is only when I call to mind an idea, that I bring it out of that interiorto existence before consciousness. Sometimes, in sickness, ideas and information, supposed to have beenforgotten years ago, because for so long they had not been brought into consciousness, once more come tolight. They were not in our possession, nor by such reproduction as occurs in sickness do they for the futurecome into our possession; and yet they were in us and continue to be in us still. Thus a person can neverknow how much of things he once learned he really has in him, should he have once forgotten them: theybelong not to his actuality or subjectivity as such, but only to his implicit self. And under all thesuperstructure of specialized and instrumental consciousness that may subsequently be added to it, theindividuality always remains this single−souled inner life. At the present stage this singleness is, primarily, tobe defined as one of feeling − as embracing the corporeal in itself: thus denying the view that this body issomething material, with parts outside parts and outside the soul. Just as the number and variety of mentalrepresentations is no argument for an extended and real multeity in the ego; so the 'real' outness of parts in thebody has no truth for the sentient soul. As sentient, the soul is characterized as immediate, and so as naturaland corporeal: but the outness of parts and sensible multiplicity of this corporeal counts for the soul (as itcounts for the intelligible unity) not as anything real, and therefore not as a barrier: the soul is this intelligibleunity in existence − the existent speculative principle. Thus in the body it is one simple, omnipresent unity.As to the representative faculty the body is but one representation, and the infinite variety of its materialstructure and organization is reduced to the simplicity of one definite conception: so in the sentient soul, thecorporeity, and all that outness of parts to parts which belongs to it, is reduced to ideality (the truth of thenatural multiplicity). The soul is virtually the totality of nature: as an individual soul it is a monad: it is itselfthe explicitly put totality of its particular world − that world being included in it and filling it up; and to thatworld it stands but as to itself.

¤ 404 As individual, the soul is exclusive and always exclusive: any difference there is, it brings within itself.What is differentiated from it is as yet no external object (as in consciousness), but only the aspects of its ownsentient totality, etc. In this partition (judgement) of itself it is always subject: its object is its substance,which is at the same time its predicate. This substance is still the content of its natural life, but turned into thecontent of the individual sensation−laden soul; yet as the soul is in that content still particular, the content isits particular world, so far as that is, in an implicit mode, included in the ideality of the subject.

By itself, this stage of mind is the stage of its darkness: its features are not developed to conscious andintelligent content: so far it is formal and only formal. It acquires a peculiar interest in cases where it is as a

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form and appears as a special state of mind (¤ 380), to which the soul, which has already advanced toconsciousness and intelligence, may again sink down. But when a truer phase of mind thus exists in a moresubordinate and abstract one, it implies a want of adaptation, which is disease. In the present stage we musttreat, first, of the abstract psychical modifications by themselves, secondly, as morbid states of mind: thelatter being only explicable by means of the former.

(a) The feeling soul in its immediacy

¤ 405 (aa) Though the sensitive individuality is undoubtedly a monadic individual, it is, because immediate,not yet as its self, not a true subject reflected into itself, and is therefore passive. Hence the individuality of itstrue self is a different subject from it − a subject which may even exist as another individual. By theself−hood of the latter it − a substance, which is only a non−independent predicate − is then set in vibrationand controlled without the least resistance on its part. This other subject by which it is so controlled may becalled its genius.

In the ordinary course of nature this is the condition of the child in its mother's womb: − a condition neithermerely bodily nor merely mental, but psychical − a correlation of soul to soul. Here are two individuals, yetin undivided psychic unity: the one as yet no self, as yet nothing impenetrable, incapable of resistance: theother is its actuating subject, the single self of the two. The mother is the genius of the child; for by genius wecommonly mean the total mental self−hood, as it has existence of its own, and constitutes the subjectivesubstantiality of some one else who is only externally treated as an individual and has only a nominalindependence. The underlying essence of the genius is the sum total of existence, of life, and of character, notas a mere possibility, or capacity, or virtuality, but as efficiency and realized activity, as concrete subjectivity.

If we look only to the spatial and material aspects of the child's existence as an embryo in its specialinteguments, and as connected with the mother by means of umbilical cord, placenta, etc., all that is presentedto the senses and reflection are certain anatomical and physiological facts − externalities and instrumentalitiesin the sensible and material which are insignificant as regards the main point, the psychical relationship.What ought to be noted as regards this psychical tie are not merely the striking effects communicated to andstamped upon the child by violent emotions, injuries, etc., of the mother, but the whole psychical judgement(partition) of the underlying nature, by which the female (like the monocotyledons among vegetables) cansuffer disruption in twain, so that the child has not merely got communicated to it, but has originally receivedmorbid dispositions as well as other predispositions of shape, temper, character, talent, idiosyncrasies, etc.

Sporadic examples and traces of this magic tie appear elsewhere in the range of self−possessed consciouslife, say between friends, especially female friends with delicate nerves (a tie which may go so far as to show'magnetic' phenomena), between husband and wife and between members of the same family.

The total sensitivity has its self here in a separate subjectivity, which, in the case cited of this sentient life inthe ordinary course of nature, is visibly present as another and a different individual. But this sensitivetotality is meant to elevate its self−hood out of itself to subjectivity in one and the same individual: which isthen its indwelling consciousness, self−possessed, intelligent, and reasonable. For such a consciousness themerely sentient life serves as an underlying and only implicitly existent material; and the self−possessedsubjectivity is the rational, self−conscious, controlling genius thereof. But this sensitive nucleus includes notmerely the purely unconscious, congenital disposition and temperament, but within its enveloping simplicityit acquires and retains also (in habit, as to which see later) all further ties and essential relationships, fortunes,principles−everything in short belonging to the character, and in whose elaboration self−conscious activityhas most effectively participated. The sensitivity is thus a soul in which the whole mental life is condensed.The total individual under this concentrated aspect is distinct from the existing and actual play of hisconsciousness, his secular ideas, developed interests, inclinations, etc. As contrasted with this looseraggregate of means and methods the more intensive form of individuality is termed the genius, whose

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decision is ultimate whatever may be the show of reasons, intentions, means, of which the more publicconsciousness is so liberal. This concentrated individuality also reveals itself under the aspect of what iscalled the heart and soul of feeling. A man is said to be heartless and unfeeling when he looks at things withself−possession and acts according to his permanent purposes, be they great substantial aims or petty andunjust interests: a good−hearted man, on the other hand, means rather one who is at the mercy of hisindividual sentiment, even when it is of narrow range and is wholly made up of particularities. Of such goodnature or goodness of heart it may be said that it is less the genius itself than the indulgere genio.

¤ 406 (bb) The sensitive life, when it becomes a form or state of the self−conscious, educated, self−possessedhuman being is a disease. The individual in such a morbid state stands in direct contact with the concretecontents of his own self, whilst he keeps his self−possessed consciousness of self and of the causal order ofthings apart as a distinct state of mind. This morbid condition is seen in magnetic somnambulism and cognatestates.

In this summary encyclopaedic account it is impossible to supply a demonstration of what the paragraphstates as the nature of the remarkable condition produced chiefly by animal magnetism − to show, in otherwords, that it is in harmony with the facts. To that end the phenomena, so complex in their nature and so verydifferent one from another, would have first of all to be brought under their general points of view. The facts,it might seem, first of all call for verification. But such a verification would, it must be added, be superfluousfor those on whose account it was called for: for they facilitate the inquiry for themselves by declaring thenarratives − infinitely numerous though they be and accredited by the education and character of thewitnesses − to be mere deception and imposture. The a priori conceptions of these inquirers are so rooted thatno testimony can avail against them, and they have even denied what they have seen with their own eyes. Inorder to believe in this department even what one's own eyes have seen and still more to understand it, thefirst requisite is not to be in bondage to the hard and fast categories of the practical intellect. The chief pointson which the discussion turns may here be given:

(a) To the concrete existence of the individual belongs the aggregate of.his fundamental interests, both theessential and the particular empirical ties which connect him with other men and the world at large. Thistotality forms his actuality, in the sense that it lies in fact immanent in him; it has already been called hisgenius. This genius is not the free mind which wills and thinks: the form of sensitivity, in which theindividual here appears innnersed, is, on the contrary, a surrender of his self−possessed intelligent existence.The first conclusion to which these considerations lead, with reference to the contents of consciousness in thesomnambulist stage, is that it is only the range of his individually moulded world (of his private interests andnarrow relationships) which appear there. Scientific theories and philosophic conceptions or general truthsrequire a different soil − require an intelligence which has risen out of the inarticulate mass of meresensitivity to free consciousness. It is foolish therefore to expect revelations about the higher ideas from thesomnambulist state.

(b) Where a human being's senses and intellect are sound, he is fully and intelligently alive to that reality ofhis which gives concrete filling to his individuality: but he is awake to it in the form of interconnectionbetween himself and the features of that reality conceived as an external and a separate world, and he isaware that this world is in itself also a complex of interconnections of a practically intelligible kind. In hissubjective ideas and plans he has also before him this causally connected scheme of things he calls his worldand the series of means which bring his ideas and his purposes into adjustment with the objective existences,which are also means and ends to each other. At the same time, this world which is outside him has itsthreads in him to such a degree that it is these threads which make him what he really is: he too wouldbecome extinct if these externalities were to disappear, unless by the aid of religion, subjective reason, andcharacter, he is in a remarkable degree self−supporting and independent of them. But, then, in the latter casehe is less susceptible of the psychical state here spoken of. − As an illustration of that identity with thesurroundings may be noted the effect produced by the death of beloved relatives, friends, etc. on those left

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behind, so that the one dies or pines away with the loss of the other. (Thus Cato, after the downfall of theRoman republic, could live no longer: his inner reality was neither wider nor higher than it.) Comparehome−sickness, and the like.

(c) But when all that occupies the waking consciousness, the world outside it and its relationship to thatworld, is under a veil, and the soul is thus sunk in sleep (in magnetic sleep, in catalepsy, and other diseases,for example, those connected with female development, or at the approach of death, etc.), then that immanentactuality of the individual remains the same substantial total as before, but now as a purely sensitive life withan inward vision and an inward consciousness. And because it is the adult, formed, and developedconsciousness which is degraded into this state of sensitivity, it retains along with its content a certainnominal self−hood, a formal vision and awareness, which, however, does not go so far as the consciousjudgement or discernment by which its contents, when it is healthy and awake, exist for it as an outwardobjectivity. The individual is thus a monad which is inwardly aware of its actuality − a genius which beholdsitself. The characteristic point in such knowledge is that the very same facts (which for the healthyconsciousness are an objective practical reality, and to know which, in its sober moods, it needs theintelligent chain of means and conditions in all their real expansion) are now immediately known andperceived in this immanence. This perception is a sort of clairvoyance; for it is a consciousness living in theundivided substantiality of the genius, and finding itself in the very heart of the interconnection, and so candispense with the series of conditions, external one to another, which lead up to the result − conditions whichcool reflection has in succession to traverse and in so doing feels the limits of its own external individuality.But such clairvoyance − just because its dim and turbid vision does not present the facts in a rationalinterconnection − is for that very reason at the mercy of every private contingency of feeling and fancy, etc. −not to mention that foreign suggestions (see later) intrude into its vision. It is thus impossible to make outwhether what the clairvoyants really see preponderates over what they deceive themselves in. − But it isabsurd to treat this visionary state as a sublime mental phase and as a truer state, capable of conveyinggeneral truths.(5)

(d) An essential feature of this sensitivity, with its absence of intelligent and volitional personality, is this,that it is a state of passivity, like that of the child in the womb. The patient in this condition is accordinglymade, and continues to be, subject to the power of another person, the magnetizer; so that when the two arethus in psychical rapport, the selfless individual, not really a 'person', has for his subjective consciousness theconsciousness of the other. This latter self−possessed individual is thus the effective subjective soul of theformer, and the genius which may even supply him with a train of ideas. That the somnambulist perceives inhimself tastes and smells which are present in the person with whom he stands en rapport, and that he isaware of the other inner ideas and present perceptions of the latter as if they were his own, shows thesubstantial identity which the soul (which even in its concreteness is also truly immaterial) is capable ofholding with another. When the substance of both is thus made one, there is only one subjectivity ofconsciousness: the patient has a sort of individuality, but it is empty, not on the spot, not actual: and thisnominal self accordingly derives its whole stock of ideas from the sensations and ideas of the other, in whomit sees, smells, tastes, reads, and hears. It is further to be noted on this point that the somnambulist is thusbrought into rapport with two genii and a twofold set of ideas, his own and that of the magnetizer. But it isimpossible to say precisely which sensations and which visions he, in this nominal perception, receives,beholds, and brings to knowledge from his own inward self, and which from the suggestions of the personwith whom he stands in relation. This uncertainty may be the source of many deceptions, and accountsamong other things for the diversity that inevitably shows itself among sonmambulists from differentcountries and under rapport with persons of different education, as regards their views on morbid states andthe methods of cure, or medicines for them, as well as on scientific and intellectual topics.

(e) As in this sensitive substantiality there is no contrast to external objectivity, so within itself the subject isso entirely one that all varieties of sensation have disappeared, and hence, when the activity of thesense−organs is asleep, the 'common sense', or 'general feeling' specifies itself to several functions; one sees

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and hears with the fingers, and especially with the pit of the stomach, etc.

To comprehend a thing means in the language of practical intelligence to be able to trace the series of meansintervening between a phenomenon and some other existence on which it depends − to discover what iscalled the ordinary course of nature, in compliance with the laws and relations of the intellect, for example,causality, reasons, etc. The purely sensitive life, on the contrary, even when it retains that mere nominalconsciousness, as in the morbid state alluded to, is just this form of immediacy, without any distinctionsbetween subjective and objective, between intelligent personality and objective world, and without theaforementioned finite ties between them. Hence to understand this intimate conjunction, which, thoughall−embracing, is without any definite points of attachment, is impossible, so long as we assume independentpersonalities, independent one of another and of the objective world which is their content − so long as weassume the absolute spatial and material externality of one part of being to another.

(b) Self−feeling (sense of self)(6)

¤ 407 (aa) The sensitive totality is, in its capacity as individual, essentially the tendency to distinguish itselfin itself, and to wake up to the judgement in itself, in virtue of which it has particular feelings and stands as asubject in respect of these aspects of itself. The subject as such gives these feelings a place as its own in itself.In these private and personal sensations it is immersed, and at the same time, because of the 'ideality' of theparticulars, it combines itself in them with itself as a subjective unit. In this way it is self− feeling, and is so atthe same time only in the particular feeling.

¤ 408 (bb) In consequence of the immediacy, which still marks the self−feeling, i.e. in consequence of theelement of corporeality which is still undetached from the mental life, and as the feeling too is itself particularand bound up with a special corporeal form, it follows that although the subject has been brought to acquireintelligent consciousness, it is still susceptible of disease, so far as to remain fast in a special phase of itsself−feeling, unable to refine it to 'ideality' and get the better of it. The fully furnished self of intelligentconsciousness is a conscious subject, which is consistent in itself according to an order and behaviour whichfollows from its individual position and its connection with the external world, which is no less a world oflaw. But when it is engrossed with a single phase of feeling, it fails to assign that phase its proper place anddue subordination in the individual system of the world which a conscious subject is. In this way the subjectfinds itself in contradiction between the totality systematized in its consciousness, and the single phase orfixed idea which is not reduced to its proper place and rank. This is Insanity or mental Derangement.

In considering insanity we must, as in other cases, anticipate the full−grown and intelligent conscious subject,which is at the same time the natural self of self−feeling. In such a phase the self can be liable to thecontradiction between its own free subjectivity and a particularity which, instead of being 'idealized' in theformer, remains as a fixed element in self−feeling. Mind as such is free, and therefore not susceptible of thismalady. But in older metaphysics mind was treated as a soul, as a thing; and it is only as a thing, i.e. assomething natural and existent, that it is liable to insanity − the settled fixture of some finite element in it.Insanity is therefore a psychical disease, i.e. a disease of body and mind alike: the commencement mayappear to start from the one more than the other, and so also may the cure.

The self−possessed and healthy subject has an active and present consciousness of the ordered whole of hisindividual world, into the system of which he subsumes each special content of sensation, idea, desire,inclination, etc., as it arises, so as to insert them in their proper place, He is the dominant genius over theseparticularities. Between this and insanity the difference is like that between waking and dreaming: only thatin insanity the dream falls within the waking limits, and so makes part of the actual self− feeling. Error andthat sort of thing is a proposition consistently admitted to a place in the objective interconnection of things. Inthe concrete, however, it is often difficult to say where it begins to become derangement. A violent, butgroundless and senseless outburst of hatred, etc., may, in contrast to a presupposed higher self−possession

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and stability of character, make its victim seem to be beside himself with frenzy. But the main point inderangement is the contradiction which a feeling with a fixed corporeal embodiment sets up against thewhole mass of adjustments forming the concrete consciousness. The mind which is in a condition of merebeing, and where such being is not rendered fluid in its consciousness, is diseased. The contents which are setfree in this reversion to mere nature are the self−seeking affections of the heart, such as vanity, pride, and therest of the passions − fancies and hopes − merely personal love and hatred. When the influence ofself−possession and of general principles, moral and theoretical, is relaxed, and ceases to keep the naturaltemper under lock and key, the, earthly elements are set free − that evil which is always latent in the heart,because the heart as immediate is natural and selfish. It is the evil genius of man which gains the upper handin insanity, but in distinction from and contrast to the better and more intelligent part, which is there also.Hence this state is mental derangement and distress. The right psychical treatment therefore keeps in view thetruth that insanity is not an abstract loss of reason (neither in the point of intelligence nor of will and itsresponsibility), but only derangement, only a contradiction in a still subsisting reason; − just as physicaldisease is not an abstract, i.e. mere and total, loss of health (if it were that, it would be death), but acontradiction in it. This humane treatment, no less benevolent than reasonable (the services of Pinel towardswhich deserve the highest acknowledgement), presupposes the patient's rationality, and in that assumptionhas the sound basis for dealing with him on this side − just as in the case of bodily disease the physician baseshis treatment on the vitality which as such still contains health.

(c) Habit(7)

¤ 409 Self−feeling, immersed in the detail of the feelings (in simple sensations, and also desires, instincts,passions, and their gratification), is undistinguished from them. But in the self there is latent a simpleself−relation of ideality, a nominal universality (which is the truth of these details): and as so universal, theself is to be stamped upon, and made appear in, this life of feeling, yet so as to distinguish itself from theparticular details, and be a realized universality. But this universality is not the full and sterling truth of thespecific feelings and desires; what they specifically contain is as yet left out of account. And so too theparticularity is, as now regarded, equally formal; it counts only as the particular being or immediacy of thesoul in opposition to its equally formal and abstract realization. This particular being of the soul is the factorof its corporeity; here we have it breaking with this corporeity, distinguishing it from itself − itself a simplebeing − and becoming the 'ideal', subjective substantiality of it − just as in its latent notion (¤ 389) it was thesubstance, and the mere substance, of it.

But this abstract realization of the soul in its corporeal vehicle is not yet the self − not the existence of theuniversal which is for the universal. It is the corporeity reduced to its mere ideality; and so far only doescorporeity belong to the soul as such. That is to say, just as space and time as the abstractone−outside−another, as, therefore, empty space and empty time, are only subjective forms, a pure act ofintuition; so is that pure being (which, through the supersession in it of the particularity of the corporeity, orof the immediate corporeity as such, has realized itself) mere intuition and no more, lacking consciousness,but the basis of consciousness. And consciousness it becomes, when the corporcity, of which it is thesubjective substance, and which still continues to exist, and that as a barrier for it, has been absorbed by it,and it has been invested with the character of self−centred subject.

¤ 410 The soul's making itself an abstract universal being, and reducing the particulars of feelings (and ofconsciousness) to a mere feature of its being is Habit. In this manner the soul has the contents in possession,and contains them in such manner that in these features it is not as sentient, nor does it stand in relationshipwith them as distinguishing itself from them, nor is absorbed in them, but has them and moves in them,without feeling or consciousness of the fact. The soul is freed from them, so far as it is not interested in oroccupied with them: and whilst existing in these forms as its possession, it is at the same time open to beotherwise occupied and engaged − say with feeling and with mental consciousness in general.

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This process of building up the particular and corporeal expressions of feeling into the being of the soulappears as a repetition of them, and the generation of habit as practice. For, this being of the soul, if in respectof the natural particular phase it be called an abstract universality to which the former is transmuted, is areflexive universality (¤ 175); i.e. the one and the same, that recurs in a series of units of sensation, is reducedto unity, and this abstract unity expressly stated.

Habit like memory, is a difficult point in mental organization: habit is the mechanism of self−feeling, asmemory is the mechanism of intelligence. The natural qualities and alterations of age, sleep, and waking are'immediately' natural: habit, on the contrary, is the mode of feeling (as well as intelligence, will, etc., so far asthey belong to self−feeling) made into a natural and mechanical existence. Habit is rightly called a secondnature; nature, because it is an immediate being of the soul; a second nature, because it is an immediacycreated by the soul, impressing and moulding the corporeality which enters into the modes of feeling as suchand into the representations and volitions so far as they have taken corporeal form (¤ 401).

In habit the human being's mode of existence is 'natural', and for that reason not free; but still free, so far asthe merely natural phase of feeling is by habit reduced to a mere being of his, and he is no longerinvoluntarily attracted or repelled by it, and so no longer interested, occupied, or dependent in regard to it.The want of freedom in habit is partly merely formal, as habit merely attaches to the being of the soul; partlyonly relative, so far as it strictly speaking arises only in the case of bad habits, or so far as a habit is opposedby another purpose: whereas the habit of right and goodness is an embodiment of liberty. The main pointabout Habit is that by its means man gets emancipated from the feelings, even in being affected by them. Thedifferent forms of this may be described as follows: (a) The immediate feeling is negated and treated asindifferent. One who gets inured against external sensations (frost, heat, weariness of the limbs, etc., sweettastes, etc.), and who hardens the heart against misfortune, acquires a strength which consists in this, thatalthough the frost, etc. − or the misfortune − is felt, the affection is deposed to a mere externality andimmediacy; the universal psychical life keeps its own abstract independence in it, and the self−feeling assuch, consciousness, reflection, and any other purposes and activity, are no longer bothered with it. (b) Thereis indifference towards the satisfaction: the desires and impulses are by the habit of their satisfactiondeadened. This is the rational liberation from them; whereas monastic renunciation and forcible interferencedo not free from them, nor are they in conception rational. Of course in all this it is assumed that the impulsesare kept as the finite modes they naturally are, and that they, like their satisfaction, are subordinated as partialfactors to the reasonable will. (c) In habit regarded as aptitude, or skill, not merely has the abstract psychicallife to be kept intact per se, but it has to be imposed as a subjective aim, to be made a power in the bodilypart, which is rendered subject and thoroughly pervious to it. Conceived as having the inward purpose of thesubjective soul thus imposed upon it, the body is treated as an immediate externality and a barrier. Thuscomes out the more decided rupture between the soul as simple self− concentration, and its earlier naturalnessand immediacy; it has lost its original and immediate identity with the bodily nature, and as external has firstto be reduced to that position. Specific feelings can only get bodily shape in a perfectly specific way (¤ 410);and the immediate portion of body is a particular possibility for a specific aim (a particular aspect of itsdifferentiated structure, a particular organ of its organic system). To mould such an aim in the organic body isto bring out and express the 'ideality' which is implicit in matter always, and especially so in the specificbodily part, and thus to enable the soul, under its volitional and conceptual characters, to exist as substance inits corporeity. In this way an aptitude shows the corporeity rendered completely pervious, made into aninstrument, so that when the conception (e.g. a series of musical notes) is in me, then without resistance andwith ease the body gives them correct utterance.

The form of habit applies to all kinds and grades of mental action. The most external of them, i.e. the spatialdirection of an individual, viz. his upright posture, has been by will made a habit − a position taken withoutadjustment and without consciousness − which continues to be an affair of his persistent will; for the manstands only because and in so far as he wills to stand, and only so long as he wills it without consciousness.Similarly our eyesight is the concrete habit which, without an express adjustment, combines in a single act

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


the several modifications of sensation, consciousness, intuition, intelligence, etc., which make it up.Thinking, too, however free and active in its own pure element it becomes, no less requires habit andfamiliarity (this impromptuity or form of immediacy), by which it is the property of my single self where Ican freely and in all directions range. It is through this habit that I come to realize my existence as a thinkingbeing. Even here, in this spontaneity of self−centred thought, there is a partnership of soul and body (hence,want of habit and too−long−continued thinking cause headache); habit diminishes this feeling, by making thenatural function an immediacy of the soul. Habit on an ampler scale, and carried out in the strictly intellectualrange, is recollection and memory, whereof we shall speak later.

Habit is often spoken of disparagingly and called lifeless, casual, and particular. And it is true that the form ofhabit, like any other, is open to anything we chance to put into it; and it is habit of living which brings ondeath, or, if quite abstract, is death itself: and yet habit is indispensable for the existence of all intellectual lifein the individual, enabling the subject to be a concrete immediacy, an 'ideality' of soul − enabling the matterof consciousness, religious, moral, etc., to be his as this self, this soul, and no other, and be neither a merelatent possibility, nor a transient emotion or idea, nor an abstract inwardness, cut off from action and reality,but part and parcel of his being. In scientific studies of the soul and the mind, habit is usually passed over −either as something contemptible − or rather for the further reason that it is one of the most difficult questionsof psychology.

(C) THE ACTUAL SOUL(8)

¤ 411 The Soul, when its corporeity has been moulded and made thoroughly its own, finds itself there asingle subject; and the corporeity is an externality which stands as a predicate, in being related to which, it isrelated to itself. This externality, in other words, represents not itself, but the soul, of which it is the sign. Inthis identity of interior and exterior, the latter subject to the former, the soul is actual: in its corporeity it hasits free shape, in which it feels itself and makes itself felt, and which as the Soul's work of art has humanpathognomic and physiognomic expression.

Under the head of human expression are included, for example, the upright figure in general, and theformation of the limbs, especially the hand, as the absolute instrument, of the mouth − laughter, weeping,etc., and the note of mentality diffused over the whole, which at once announces the body as the externalityof a higher nature. This note is so slight, indefinite, and inexpressible a modification, because the figure in itsexternality is something immediate and natural, and can therefore only be an indefinite and quite imperfectsign for the mind, unable to represent it in its actual universality. Seen from the animal world, the humanfigure is the supreme phase in which mind makes an appearance. But for the mind it is only its firstappearance, while language is its perfect expression. And the human figure, though the proximate phase ofmind's existence, is at the same time in its physiognomic and pathognomic quality something contingent to it.To try to raise physiognomy and above all cranioscopy (phrenology) to the rank of sciences, was thereforeone of the vainest fancies, still vainer than a signatura rerum, which supposed the shape of a plant to affordindication of its medicinal virtue.

¤ 412 Implicitly the soul shows the untruth and unreality of matter; for the soul, in its concentrated self, cutsitself off from its immediate being, placing the latter over against it as a corporeity incapable of offeringresistance to its moulding influence. The soul, thus setting in opposition its being to its (conscious) self,absorbing it, and making it its own, has lost the meaning of mere soul, or the 'immediacy' of mind. The actualsoul with its sensation and its concrete self−feeling turned into habit, has implicitly realised the 'ideality' of itsqualities; in this externality it has recollected and inwardized itself, and is infinite self−relation. This freeuniversality thus made explicit shows the soul awaking to the higher stage of the ego, or abstract universality,in so far as it is for the abstract universality. In this way it gains the position of thinker and subject − speciallya subject of the judgement in which the ego excludes from itself the sum total of its merely natural features asan object, a world external to it − but with such respect to that object that in it it is immediately reflected into

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


itself. Thus soul rises to become Consciousness.

1. Naturliche Seele.

2. Naturliche Qualitaten.

3. Empfindung.

4. Die fuhlende Seele.

5. Plato had a better idea of the relation of prophecy generally to the state of sober consciousness than manymoderns, who supposed that the Platonic language on the subject of enthusiasm authorized their belief in thesublimity of the revelations of somnambulistic vision. Plato says in the Timaeus (p. 71), 'The author of ourbeing so ordered our inferior parts that they too might obtain a measure of truth, and in the liver placed theiroracle (the power of divination by dreams). And herein is a proof that God has given the art of divination, notto the wisdom, but to the foolishness of man; for no man when in his wits attains prophetic truth andinspiration; but when he receives the inspired word, either his intelligence is enthralled by sleep, or he isdemented by some distemper or possession (enthusiasm).' Plato very correctly notes not merely the bodilyconditions on which such visionary knowledge depends, and the possibility of the truth of the dreams, butalso the inferiority of them to the reasonable frame of mind.

6. Selbstgefuhl.

7. Gewohnheit.

8. Die wirkliche Seele

SUB−SECTION B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS

(a) Consciousness proper (a) Sensuous Consciousness (b) Sense−perception (c) The Intellect (b) Self−consciousness (a) Appetite (b) Self−consciousness Recognitive (c) Universal Self−consciousness (c) Reason

B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND

CONSCIOUSNESS

¤ 413 Consciousness constitutes the reflected or correlational grade of mind: the grade of mind asappearance. Ego is infinite self−relation of mind, but as subjective or as self−certainty. The immediateidentity of the natural soul has been raised to this pure 'ideal' self−identity; and what the former contained isfor this self−subsistent reflection set forth as an object. The pure abstract freedom of mind lets go from it itsspecific qualities − the soul's natural life − to an equal freedom as an independent object. It is of this latter, asexternal to it, that the ego is in the first instance aware (conscious), and as such it is Consciousness. Ego, asthis absolute negativity, is implicitly the identity in the otherness: the ego is itself that other and stretchesover the object (as if that object were implicitly cancelled) − it is one side of the relationship and the wholerelationship − the light, which manifests itself and something else too.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

SUB−SECTION B. PHENOMENOLOGY OF MIND, CONSCIOUSNESS 18

¤ 414 The self−identity of the mind, thus first made explicit as the Ego, is only its abstract formal ideality. Assoul it was under the phase of substantial universality; now, as subjective reflection in itself, it is referred tothis substantiality as to its negative, something dark and beyond it. Hence consciousness, like reciprocaldependence in general, is the contradiction between the independence of the two sides and their identity inwhich they are merged into one. The mind as ego is essence; but since reality, in the sphere of essence, isrepresented as in immediate being and at the same time as 'ideal', it is as consciousness only the appearance(phenomenon) of mind.

¤ 415 As the ego is by itself only a formal identity, the dialectical movement of its intelligible unity, i.e. thesuccessive steps in further specification of consciousness, does not, to it, seem to be its own activity, but isimplicit, and to the ego it seems an alteration of the object. Consciousness consequently appears differentlymodified according to the difference of the given object; and the gradual specification of consciousnessappears as a variation in the characteristics of its objects. Ego, the subject of consciousness, is thinking: thelogical process of modifying the object is what is identical in subject and object, their absoluteinterdependence, what makes the object the subject's own.

The Kantian philosophy may be most accurately described as having viewed the mind as consciousness, andas containing the propositions only of a phenomenology (not of a philosophy) of mind. The Ego Kant regardsas reference to something away and beyond (which in its abstract description is termed the thing−in−itself);and it is only from this finite point of view that he treats both intellect and will. Though in the notion of apower of reflective judgement he touches upon the Idea of mind − a subject−objectivity, an intuitive intellect,etc., and even the Idea of Nature, still this Idea is again deposed to an appearance, i.e. to a subjective maxim(¤ 58). Reinhold may therefore be said to have correctly appreciated Kantism when he treated it as a theory ofconsciousness (under the name of 'faculty of ideation'). Fichte kept to the same point of view: his non−ego isonly something set over against the ego, only defined as in consciousness: it is made no more than an infinite'shock', i.e. a thing−in−itself. Both systems therefore have clearly not reached the intelligible unity or themind as it actually and essentially is, but only as it is in reference to something else.

As against Spinozism, again, it is to be noted that the mind in the judgement by which it 'constitutes' itself anego (a free subject contrasted with its qualitative affection) has emerged from substance, and that thephilosophy, which gives this judgement as the absolute characteristic of mind, has emerged from Spinozism.

¤ 416 The aim of conscious mind is to make its appearance identical with its essence, to raise itsself−certainty to truth. The existence of mind in the stage of consciousness is finite, because it is merely anominal self−relation, or mere certainty. The object is only abstractly characterized as its; in other words, inthe object it is only as an abstract ego that the mind is reflected into itself: hence its existence there has still acontent, which is not as its own.

¤ 417 The grades of this elevation of certainty to truth are three in number: first (a) consciousness in general,with an object set against it; (b) self−consciousness, for which ego is the object; (c) unity of consciousnessand self−consciousness, where the mind sees itself embodied in the object and sees itself as implicitly andexplicitly determinate, as Reason, the notion of mind.

(a) CONSCIOUSNESS PROPER(1)

(a) Sensuous consciousness

¤ 418 Consciousness is, first, immediate consciousness, and its reference to the object accordingly the simple,and underived certainty of it. The object similarly, being immediate, an existent, reflected in itself, is furthercharacterized as immediately singular. This is sense−consciousness.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


Consciousness − as a case of correlation − comprises only the categories belonging to the abstract ego orformal thinking; and these it treats as features of the object (¤ 415). Sense−consciousness therefore is awareof the object as an existent, a something, an existing thing, a singular, and so on. It appears as wealthiest inmatter, but as poorest in thought. That wealth of matter is made out of sensations: they are the material ofconsciousness (¤ 414), the substantial and qualitative, what the soul in its anthropological sphere is and findsin itself. This material the ego (the reflection of the soul in itself) separates from itself, and puts it first underthe category of being. Spatial and temporal Singularness, here and now (the terms by which in thePhenomenology of the Mind (Werke ii, p. 73), I described the object of sense−consciousness) strictly belongsto intuition. At present the object is at first to be viewed only in its correlation to consciousness, i.e. asomething external to it, and not yet as external on its own part, or as being beside and out of itself.

¤ 419 The sensible as somewhat becomes an other: the reflection in itself of this somewhat, the thing, hasmany properties; and as a single (thing) in its immediacy has several predicates. The muchness of thesense−singular thus becomes a breadth − a variety of relations, reflectional attributes, and universalities.These are logical terms introduced by the thinking principle, i.e. in this case by the Ego, to describe thesensible. But the Ego as itself apparent sees in all this characterization a change in the object; and sensuousconsciousness, so construing the object, is sense−perception.

(b) Sense−perception (2)

¤ 420 Consciousness, having passed beyond the sensible, wants to take the object in its truth, not as merelyimmediate, but as mediated, reflected in itself, and universal. Such an object is a combination of sensequalities with attributes of wider range by which thought defines concrete relations and connections. Hencethe identity of consciousness with the object passes from the abstract identity of 'I am sure' to the definiteidentity of 'I know, and am aware'.

The particular grade of consciousness on which Kantism conceives the mind is perception: which is also thegeneral point of view taken by ordinary consciousness, and more or less by the sciences. The sensuouscertitudes of single apperceptions or observations form the starting−point: these are supposed to be elevatedto truth, by being regarded in their bearings, reflected upon, and on the lines of definite categories turned atthe same time into something necessary and universal, viz. experiences.

¤ 421 This conjunction of individual and universal is admixture − the individual remains at the bottom hardand unaffected by the universal, to which, however, it is related. It is therefore a tissue of contradictions −between the single things of sense apperception, which form the alleged ground of general experience, andthe universality which has a higher claim to be the essence and ground − between the individuality of a thingwhich, taken in its concrete content, constitutes its independence and the various properties which, free fromthis negative link and from one another, are independent universal matters (¤ 123). This contradiction of thefinite which runs through all forms of the logical spheres turns out most concrete, when the somewhat isdefined as object (¤¤ 194 seqq.).

(c) The Intellect (3)

¤ 422 The proximate truth of perception is that it is the object which is an appearance, and that the object'sreflection in self is on the contrary a self−subsistent inward and universal. The consciousness of such anobject is intellect. This inward, as we called it, of the thing is, on one hand, the suppression of the multiplicityof the sensible, and, in that manner, an abstract identity: on the other hand, however, it also for that reasoncontains the multiplicity, but as an interior 'simple' difference, which remains self−identical in thevicissitudes of appearance. The simple difference is the realm of the laws of the phenomena − a copy of thephenomenon, but brought to rest and universality.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


¤ 423 The law, at first stating the mutual dependence of universal, permanent terms, has, in so far as itsdistinction is the inward one, its necessity on its own part; the one of the terms, as not externally differentfrom the other, lies immediately in the other. But in this manner the interior distinction is, what it is in truth,the distinction on its own part, or the distinction which is none. With this new form−characteristic, on thewhole, consciousness implicitly vanishes: for consciousness as such implies the reciprocal independence ofsubject and object. The ego in its judgement has an object which is not distinct from it − it has itself.Consciousness has passed into self−consciousness.

(b) SELF−CONSCIOUSNESS(4)

¤ 424 Self−consciousness is the truth of consciousness: the latter is a consequence of the former, allconsciousness of an other object being as a matter of fact also self−consciousness. The object is my idea: Iam aware of the object as mine; and thus in it I am aware of me. The formula of self−consciousness is I = I: −abstract freedom, pure 'Ideality'; and thus it lacks 'reality': for as it is its own object, there is strictly speakingno object, because there is no distinction between it and the object.

¤ 425 Abstract self−consciousness is the first negation of consciousness, and for that reason it is burdenedwith an external object, or, nominally, with the negation of it. Thus it is at the same time the antecedent stage,consciousness: it is the contradiction of itself as self−consciousness and as consciousness. But the latteraspect and the negation in general is in I = I potentially suppressed; and hence as this certitude of self againstthe object it is the impulse to realize its implicit nature, by giving its abstract self−awareness content andobjectivity, and in the other direction to free itself from its sensuousness, to set aside the given objectivity andidentify it with itself. The two processes are one and the same, the identification of its consciousness andself−consciousness.

(a) Appetite or Instinctive Desire(5)

¤ 426 Self−consciousness, in its immediacy, is a singular, and a desire (appetite) − the contradiction impliedin its abstraction which should yet be objective − or in its immediacy which has the shape of an externalobject and should be subjective. The certitude of one's self, which issues from the suppression of mereconsciousness, pronounces the object null: and the outlook of self−consciousness towards the object equallyqualifies the abstract ideality of such self−consciousness as null.

¤ 427 Self−consciousness, therefore, knows itself implicit in the object, which in this outlook is conformableto the appetite. In the negation of the two one−sided moments by the ego's own activity, this identity comesto be for the ego. To this activity the object, which implicitly and for self−consciousness is self−less, canmake no resistance: the dialectic, implicit in it, towards self−suppression exists in this case as that activity ofthe ego. Thus while the given object is rendered subjective, the subjectivity divests itself of its one−sidednessand becomes objective to itself.

¤ 428 The product of this process is the fast conjunction of the ego with itself, its satisfaction realized, anditself made actual. On the external side it continues, in this return upon itself, primarily describable as anindividual, and maintains itself as such; because its bearing upon the self−less object is purely negative, thelatter, therefore, being merely consumed. Thus appetite in its satisfaction is always destructive, and in itscontent selfish: and as the satisfaction has only happened in the individual (and that is transient) the appetiteis again generated in the very act of satisfaction.

¤ 429 But on the inner side, or implicitly, the sense of self which the ego gets in the satisfaction does notremain in abstract self−concentration or in mere individuality; on the contrary − as negation of immediacyand individuality the result involves a character of universality and of the identity of self−consciousness withits object. The judgement or diremption of this self−consciousness is the consciousness of a 'free' object, in

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


which ego is aware of itself as an ego, which however is also still outside it.

(b) Self−consciousness Recognitive(6)

¤ 430 Here there is a self−consciousness for a self−consciousness, at first immediately, as one of two thingsfor another. In that other as ego I behold myself, and yet also an immediately existing object, another egoabsolutely independent of me and opposed to me. (The suppression of the singleness of self−consciousnesswas only a first step in the suppression, and it merely led to the characterization of it as particular.) Thiscontradiction gives either self−consciousness the impulse to show itself as a free self, and to exist as such forthe other: − the process of recognition.

¤ 431 The process is a battle. I cannot be aware of me as myself in another individual, so long as I see in thatother an other and an immediate existence: and I am consequently bent upon the suppression of thisimmediacy of his. But in like measure I cannot be recognized as immediate, except so far as I overcome themere immediacy on my own part, and thus give existence to my freedom. But this immediacy is at the sametime the corporeity of self−consciousness, in which as in its sign and tool the latter has its own sense of self,and its being for others, and the means for entering into relation with them.

¤ 432 The fight of recognition is a life and death struggle: either self−consciousness imperils the other's life,and incurs a like peril for its own − but only peril, for either is no less bent on maintaining his life, as theexistence of his freedom. Thus the death of one, though by the abstract, therefore rude, negation ofimmediacy, it, from one point of view, solves the contradiction, is yet, from the essential point of view (i.e.the outward and visible recognition), a new contradiction (for that recognition is at the same time undone bythe other's death) and a greater than the other.

¤ 433 But because life is as requisite as liberty to the solution, the fight ends in the first instance as aone−sided negation with inequality. While the one combatant prefers life, retains his singleself−consciousness, but surrenders his claim for recognition, the other holds fast to his self−assertion and isrecognized by the former as his superior. Thus arises the status of master and slave.

In the battle for recognition and the subjugation under a master, we see, on their phenomenal side, theemergence of man's social life and the commencement of political union. Force, which is the basis of thisphenomenon, is not on that account a basis of right, but only the necessary and legitimate factor in thepassage from the state of self−consciousness sunk in appetite and selfish isolation into the state of universalself−consciousness. Force, then, is the external or phenomenal commencement of states, not their underlyingand essential principle.

¤ 434 This status, in the first place, implies common wants and common concern for their satisfaction − forthe means of mastery, the slave, must likewise be kept in life. In place of the rude destruction of theimmediate object there ensues acquisition, preservation, and formation of it, as the instrumentality in whichthe two extremes of independence and non−independence are welded together. The form of universality thusarising in satisfying the want, creates a permanent means and a provision which takes care for and secures thefuture.

¤ 435 But secondly, when we look to the distinction of the two, the master beholds in the slave and hisservitude the supremacy of his single self−hood resulting from the suppression of immediate self−hood, asuppression, however, which falls on another. This other, the slave, however, in the service of the master,works off his individualist self−will, overcomes the inner immediacy of appetite, and in this divestment ofself and in 'the fear of his lord' makes 'the beginning of wisdom' − the passage to universal self−consciousness.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


(c) Universal Self−consciousness

¤ 436 Universal self−consciousness is the affirmative awareness of self in an other self: each self as a freeindividuality has his own 'absolute' independence, yet in virtue of the negation of its immediacy or appetitewithout distinguishing itself from that other. Each is thus universal self−consciousness and objective; eachhas 'real' universality in the shape of reciprocity, so far as each knows itself recognized in the other freeman,and is aware of this in so far as it recognizes the other and knows him to be free.

This universal reappearance of self−consciousness − the notion which is aware of itself in its objectivity as asubjectivity identical with itself and for that reason universal − is the form of consciousness which lies at theroot of all true mental or spiritual life − in family, fatherland, state, and of all virtues, love, friendship, valour,honour, fame. But this appearance of the underlying essence may also be severed from that essence, and bemaintained apart in worthless honour, idle fame, etc.

¤ 437 This unity of consciousness and self−consciousness implies in the first instance the individualsmutually throwing light upon each other. But the difference between those who are thus identified is merevague diversity − or rather it is a difference which is none. Hence its truth is the fully and really existentuniversality and objectivity of self−consciousness − which is Reason.

Reason, as the Idea (¤ 213) as it here appears, is to be taken as meaning that the distinction between notionand reality which it unifies has the special aspect of a distinction between the self−concentrated notion orconsciousness, and the object subsisting external and opposed to it.

(c) REASON(7)

¤ 438 The essential and actual truth which reason is, lies in the simple identity of the subjectivity of thenotion with its objectivity and universality. The universality of reason, therefore, whilst it signifies that theobject, which was only given in consciousness qua consciousness, is now itself universal, permeating andencompassing the ego, also signifies that the pure ego is the pure form which overlaps the object andencompasses it.

¤ 439 Self−consciousness, thus certified that its determinations are no less objective, or determinations of thevery being of things, than they are its own thoughts, is Reason, which as such an identity is not only theabsolute substance, but the truth that knows it. For truth here has, as its peculiar mode and immanent form,the self−centred pure notion, ego, the certitude of self as infinite universality. Truth, aware of what it is, ismind (spirit).

1. Das Bewu§tsein als solches: (a) Das sinnliche Bewu§tsein

2. Wahrnehmung

3. Der Verstand.

4. Selbstbewu§tsein.

5. Die Begierde

6. Das anerkennende Selbstbewu§tsein.

7. Die Vernunft.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


SUB−SECTION C. PSYCHOLOGY, MIND

(a) Theoretical Mind (a) Intuition (b) Representation (aa) Recollection (bb) Imagination (cc) Memory (c) Thinking (b) Mind Practical (a) Practical Sense or Feeling (b) The Impulses and Choice (c) Happiness (c) Free Mind

C. PSYCHOLOGY

MIND(1)

¤ 440 Mind has defined itself as the truth of soul and consciousness − the former a simple immediate totality,the latter now an infinite form which is not, like consciousness, restricted by that content, and does not standin mere correlation to it as to its object, but is an awareness of this substantial totality, neither subjective norobjective. Mind, therefore, starts only from its own being and is in correlation only with its own features.

Psychology accordingly studies the faculties or general modes of mental activity qua mental − mental vision,ideation, remembering, etc., desires, etc.− apart both from the content, which on the phenomenal side isfound in empirical ideation, in thinking also and in desire and will, and from the two forms in which thesemodes exist, viz. in the soul as a physical mode, and in consciousness itself as a separately existent object ofthat consciousness. This, however, is not an arbitrary abstraction by the psychologist. Mind is just thiselevation above nature and physical modes, and above the complication with an external object − in oneword, above the material, as its concept has just shown. All it has now to do is to realize this notion of itsfreedom, and get rid of the form of immediacy with which it once more begins. The content which is elevatedto intuitions is its sensations: it is its intuitions also which are transmuted into representations, and itsrepresentations which are transmuted again into thoughts, etc.

¤ 441 The soul is finite, so far as its features are immediate or connatural. Consciousness is finite, in so far asit has an object. Mind is finite, in so far as, though it no longer has an object, it has a mode in its knowledge;i.e. it is finite by means of its immediacy, or, what is the same thing, by being subjective or only a notion.And it is a matter of no consequence, which is defined as its notion, and which as the reality of that notion.Say that its notion is the utterly infinite objective reason, then its reality is knowledge or intelligence: say thatknowledge is its notion, then its reality is that reason, and the realization of knowledge consists inappropriating reason. Hence the finitude of mind is to be placed in the (temporary) failure of knowledge toget hold of the full reality of its reason, or, equally, in the (temporary) failure of reason to attain fullmanifestation in knowledge. Reason at the same time is only infinite so far as it is 'absolute' freedom; so far,that is, as presupposing itself for its knowledge to work upon, it thereby reduces itself to finitude, and appearsas everlasting movement of superseding this immediacy, of comprehending itself, and being a rationalknowledge.

¤ 442 The progress of mind is development, in so far as its existent phase, viz. knowledge, involves as itsintrinsic purpose and burden that utter and complete autonomy which is rationality; in which case the actionof translating this purpose into reality is strictly only a nominal passage over into manifestation, and is eventhere a return into itself. So far as knowledge which has not shaken off its original quality of mere knowledgeis only abstract or formal, the goal of mind is to give it objective fulfilment, and thus at the same time

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

SUB−SECTION C. PSYCHOLOGY, MIND 24

produce its freedom.

The development here meant is not that of the individual (which has a certain anthropological character),where faculties and forces are regarded as successively emerging and presenting themselves in externalexistences series of steps, on the ascertainment of which there was for a long time great stress laid (by thesystem of Condillac), as if a conjectural natural emergence could exhibit the origin of these faculties andexplain them. In Condillac's method there is an unmistakable intention to show how the several modes ofmental activity could be made intelligible without losing sight of mental unity, and to exhibit their necessaryinterconnection. But the categories employed in doing so are of a wretched sort. Their ruling principle is thatthe sensible is taken (and with justice) as the prius or the initial basis, but that the latter phases that follow thisstarting−point present themselves as emerging in a solely affirmative manner, and the negative aspect ofmental activity, by which this material is transmuted into mind and destroyed as a sensible, is misconceivedand overlooked. As the theory of Condillac states it, the sensible is not merely the empirical first, but is left asif it were the true and essential foundation.

Similarly, if the activities of mind are treated as mere manifestations, forces, perhaps in terms stating theirutility or suitability for some other interest of head or heart, there is no indication of the true final aim of thewhole business. That can only be the intelligible unity of mind, and its activity can only have itself as aim;i.e. its aim can only be to get rid of the form of immediacy or subjectivity, to reach and get hold of itself, andto liberate itself to itself. In this way the so−called faculties of mind as thus distinguished are only to betreated as steps of this liberation. And this is the only rational mode of studying the mind and its variousactivities.

¤ 443 As consciousness has for its object the stage which preceded it, viz. the natural soul (¤ 413), so mindhas or rather makes consciousness its object: i.e. whereas consciousness is only the virtual identity of the egowith its other (¤ 415), the mind realizes that identity as the concrete unity which it and it only knows. Itsproductions are governed by the principle of all reason that the contents are at once potentially existent, andare the mind's own, in freedom. Thus, if we consider the initial aspect of mind, that aspect is twofold − asbeing and as its own: by the one, the mind finds in itself something which is, by the other it affirms it to beonly its own. The way of mind is therefore

(a) to be theoretical: it has to do with the rational as its immediate affection which it must render its own: or ithas to free knowledge from its presupposedness and therefore from its abstractness, and make the affectionsubjective. When the affection has been rendered its own, and the knowledge consequently characterized asfree intelligence, i.e. as having its full and free characterization in itself, it is

(b) Will: practical mind, which in the first place is likewise formal − i.e. its content is at first only its own,and is immediately willed; and it proceeds next to liberate its volition from its subjectivity, which is theone−sided form of its contents, so that it

(c) confronts itself as free mind and thus gets rid of both its defects of one−sidedness.

¤ 444 The theoretical as well as the practical mind still fall under the general range of Mind Subjective. Theyare not to be distinguished as active and passive. Subjective mind is productive: but it is a merely nominalproductivity. Inwards, the theoretical mind produces only its 'ideal' world, and gains abstract autonomywithin; while the practical, while it has to do with autonomous products, with a material which is its own, hasa material which is only nominally such, and therefore a restricted content, for which it gains the form ofuniversality. Outwards, the subjective mind (which as a unity of soul and consciousness, is thus also a reality− a reality at once anthropological and conformable to consciousness) has for its products, in the theoreticalrange, the word, and in the practical (not yet deed and action, but) enjoyment.

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Psychology, like logic, is one of those sciences which in modern times have yet derived least profit from themore general mental culture and the deeper conception of reason. It is still extremely ill off. The turn whichthe Kantian philosophy has taken has given it greater importance: it has, and that in its empirical condition,been claimed as the basis of metaphysics, which is to consist of nothing but the empirical apprehension andthe analysis of the facts of human consciousness, merely as facts, just as they are given. This position ofpsychology, mixing it up with forms belonging to the range of consciousness and with anthropology, has ledto no improvement in its own condition: but it has had the further effect that, both for the mind as such, andfor metaphysics and philosophy generally, all attempts have been abandoned to ascertain the necessity ofessential and actual reality, to get at the notion and the truth.

(a) THEORETICAL MIND

¤ 445 Intelligence(2) finds itself determined: this is its apparent aspect from which in its immediacy it starts.But as knowledge, intelligence consists in treating what is found as its own. Its activity has to do with theempty form − the pretense of finding reason: and its aim is to realize its concept or to be reason actual, alongwith which the content is realized as rational. This activity is cognition. The nominal knowledge, which isonly certitude, elevates itself, as reason is concrete, to definite and conceptual knowledge. The course of thiselevation is itself rational, and consists in a necessary passage (governed by the concept) of one grade or termof intelligent activity (a so−called faculty of mind) into another. The refutation which such cognition gives ofthe semblance that the rational is found, starts from the certitude or the faith of intelligence in its capability ofrational knowledge, and in the possibility of being able to appropriate the reason, which it and the contentvirtually is.

The distinction of Intelligence from Will is often incorrectly taken to mean that each has a fixed and separateexistence of its own, as if volition could be without intelligence, or the activity of intelligence could bewithout will. The possibility of a culture of the intellect which leaves the heart untouched, as it is said, and ofthe heart without the intellect − of hearts which in one−sided way want intellect, and heartless intellects −only proves at most that bad and radically untrue existences occur. But it is not philosophy which should takesuch untruths of existence and of mere imagining for truth − take the worthless for the essential nature. Ahost of other phrases used of intelligence, e.g. that it receives and accepts impressions from outside, that ideasarise through the causal operations of external things upon it, etc., belong to a point of view utterly alien tothe mental level or to the position of philosophic study.

A favorite reflectional form is that of powers and faculties of soul, intelligence, or mind. Faculty, like poweror force, is the fixed quality of any object of thought, conceived as reflected into self. Force (¤ 136) is nodoubt the infinity of form − of the inward and the outward: but its essential finitude involves the indifferenceof content to form (ib. note). In this lies the want of organic unity which by this reflectional form, treatingmind as a 'lot' of forces, is brought into mind, as it is by the same method brought into nature. Any aspectwhich can be distinguished in mental action is stereotyped as an independent entity, and the mind thus madea skeleton−like mechanical collection. It makes absolutely no difference if we substitute the expression'activities' for powers and faculties. Isolate the activities and you similarly make the mind a mere aggregate,and treat their essential correlation as an external incident.

The action of intelligence as theoretical mind has been called cognition (knowledge). Yet this does not meanintelligence inter alia knows − besides which it also intuits, conceives, remembers, imagines, etc. To take upsuch a position is in the first instance, part and parcel of that isolating of mental activity just censured; but itis also in addition connected with the great question of modern times, as to whether true knowledge or theknowledge of truth is possible − which, if answered in the negative, must lead to abandoning the effort. Thenumerous aspects and reasons and modes of phrase with which external reflection swells the bulk of thisquestion are cleared up in their place: the more external the attitude of understanding in the question, themore diffuse it makes its simple object. At the present place the simple concept of cognition is what confronts

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the quite general assumption taken up by the question, viz. the assumption that the possibility of trueknowledge in general is in dispute, and the assumption that it is possible for us at our will either to prosecuteor to abandon cognition. The concept or possibility of cognition has come out as intelligence itself, as thecertitude of reason: the act of cognition itself is therefore the actuality of intelligence. It follows from this thatit is absurd to speak of intelligence and yet at the same time of the possibility or choice of knowing or not.But cognition is genuine, just so far as it realizes itself, or makes the concept its own. This nominaldescription has its concrete meaning exactly where cognition has it. The stages of its realizing activity areintuition, conception, memory, etc.: these activities have no other immanent meaning: their aim is solely theconcept of cognition (¤ 445 note). If they are isolated, however, then an impression is implied that they areuseful for something else than cognition, or that they severally procure a cognitive satisfaction of their own;and that leads to a glorification of the delights of intuition, remembrance, imagination. It is true that even asisolated (i.e. as non−intelligent), intuition, imagination, etc. can afford a certain satisfaction: what physicalnature succeeds in doing by its fundamental quality − its out−of−selfness − exhibiting the elements or factorsof immanent reason external to each other − that the intelligence can do by voluntary act, but the same resultmay happen where the intelligence is itself only natural and untrained. But the true satisfaction, it is admitted,is only afforded by an intuition permeated by intellect and mind, by rational conception, by products ofimagination which are permeated by reason and exhibit ideas − in a word, by cognitive intuition, cognitiveconception, etc. The truth ascribed to such satisfaction lies in this, that intuition, conception, etc. are notisolated, and exist only as 'moments' in the totality of cognition itself.

(a) Intuition (Intelligent Perception)(3)

¤ 446 The mind which as soul is physically conditioned − which as consciousness stands to this condition onthe same terms as to an outward object − but which as intelligence finds itself so characterized − is (1) aninarticulate embryonic life, in which it is to itself as it were palpable and has the whole material of itsknowledge. In consequence of the immediacy in which it is thus originally, it is in this stage only as anindividual and possesses a vulgar subjectivity. It thus appears as mind in the guise of feeling.

If feeling formerly turned up (¤ 399) as a mode of the soul's existence, the finding of it or its immediacy wasin that case essentially to be conceived as a congenital or corporeal condition; whereas at present it is only tobe taken abstractly in the general sense of immediacy.

¤ 447 The characteristic form of feeling is that though it is a mode of some 'affection', this mode is simple.Hence feeling, even should its import be most sterling and true, has the form of casual particularity − not tomention that its import may also be the most scanty and most untrue.

It is commonly enough assumed that mind has in its feeling the material of its ideas, but the statement is moreusually understood in a sense the opposite of that which it has here. In contrast with the simplicity of feelingit is usual rather to assume that the primary mental phase is judgement generally, or the distinction ofconsciousness into subject and object; and the special quality of sensation is derived from an independentobject, external or internal. With us, in the truth of mind, the mere consciousness point of view, as opposed totrue mental 'idealism', is swallowed up, and the matter of feeling has rather been supposed already asimmanent in the mind. − It is commonly taken for granted that as regards content there is more in feeling thanin thought: this being specially affirmed of moral and religious feelings. Now the material, which the mind asit feels is to itself, is here the result and the mature result of a fully organized reason. hence under the head offeeling is comprised all rational and indeed all spiritual content whatever. But the form of selfish singlenessto which feeling reduces the mind is the lowest and worst vehicle it can have − one in which it is not found asa free and infinitely universal principle, but rather as subjective and private, in content and value entirelycontingent. Trained and sterling feeling is the feeling of an educated mind which has acquired theconsciousness of the true differences of things, of their essential relationships and real characters; and it iswith such a mind that this rectified material enters into its feeling and receives this form. Feeling is the

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immediate, as it were the closest, contact in which the thinking subject can stand to a given content. Againstthat content the subject reacts first of all with its particular self−feeling, which though it may be of moresterling value and of wider range than a one−sided intellectual standpoint, may just as likely be narrow andpoor; and in any case is the form of the particular and subjective. If a man on any topic appeals not to thenature and notion of the thing, or at least to reasons − to the generalities of common sense − but to his feeling,the only thing to do is to let him alone, because by his behaviour he refuses to have any lot or part in commonrationality, and shuts himself up in his own isolated subjectivity − his private and particular self.

¤ 448 (2) As this immediate finding is broken up into elements, we have the one factor in Attention − theabstract identical direction of mind (in feeling, as also in all other more advanced developments of it) − anactive self−collection − the factor of fixing it as our own, but with an as yet only nominal autonomy ofintelligence. Apart from such attention there is nothing for the mind. The other factor is to invest the specialquality of feeling, as contrasted with this inwardness of mind, with the character of something existent, but asa negative or as the abstract otherness of itself. Intelligence thus defines the content of sensation as somethingthat is out of itself, projects it into time and space, which are the forms in which it is intuitive. To the view ofconsciousness the material is only an object of consciousness, a relative other: from mind it receives therational characteristic of being its very other (¤¤ 247, 254).

¤ 449 (3) When intelligence reaches a concrete unity of the two factors, that is to say, when it is at onceself−collected in this externally existing material, and yet in this self−collectedness sunk in theout−of−selfness, it is Intuition or Mental Vision.

¤ 450 At and towards this its own out−of−selfness, intelligence no less essentially directs its attention. In thisits immediacy it is an awaking to itself, a recollection of itself. Thus intuition becomes a concretion of thematerial with the intelligence, which makes it its own, so that it no longer needs this immediacy, no longerneeds to find the content.

(b) Representation (or Mental Idea)(4)

¤ 451 Representation is this recollected or inwardized intuition, and as such is the middle between that stageof intelligence where it finds itself immediately subject to modification and that where intelligence is in itsfreedom, or, as thought. The representation is the property of intelligence; with a preponderating subjectivity,however, as its right of property is still conditioned by contrast with the immediacy, and the representationcannot as it stands be said to be. The path of intelligence in representations is to render the immediacyinward, to invest itself with intuitive action in itself, and at the same time to get rid of the subjectivity of theinwardness, and inwardly divest itself of it; so as to be in itself in an externality of its own. But asrepresentation begins from intuition and the ready−found material of intuition, the intuitional contrast stillcontinues to affect its activity, and makes its concrete products still 'syntheses', which do not grow to theconcrete immanence of the notion till they reach the stage of thought.

(aa) Recollection(5)

¤ 452 Intelligence, as it at first recollects the intuition, places the content of feeling in its own inwardness − ina space and a time of its own. In this way that content is (1) an image or picture, liberated from its originalimmediacy and abstract singleness amongst other things, and received into the universality of the ego. Theimage loses the full complement of features proper to intuition, and is arbitrary or contingent, isolated, wemay say, from the external place, time, and immediate context in which the intuition stood.

¤ 453 (2) The image is of itself transient, and intelligence itself is as attention its time and also its place, itswhen and where. But intelligence is not only consciousness and actual existence, but qua intelligence is thesubject and the potentiality of its own specializations. The image when thus kept in mind is no longer

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existent, but stored up out of consciousness.

To grasp intelligence as this night−like mine or pit in which is stored a world of infinitely many images andrepresentations, yet without being in consciousness, is from the one point of view the universal postulatewhich bids us treat the notion as concrete, in the way we treat, for example, the germ as affirmativelycontaining, in virtual possibility, all the qualities that come into existence in the subsequent development ofthe tree. Inability to grasp a universal like this, which, though intrinsically concrete, still continues simple, iswhat has led people to talk about special fibres and areas as receptacles of particular ideas. It was felt thatwhat was diverse should in the nature of things have a local habitation peculiar to itself. But whereas thereversion of the germ from its existing specializations to its simplicity in a purely potential existence takesplace only in another germ − the germ of the fruit; intelligence qua intelligence shows the potential coming tofree existence in its development, and yet at the same time collecting itself in its inwardness. Hence from theother point of view intelligence is to be conceived as this subconscious mine, i.e. as the existent universal inwhich the different has not yet been realized in its separations. And it is indeed this potentiality which is thefirst form of universality offered in mental representation.

¤ 454 (3) An image thus abstractly treasured up needs, if it is to exist, an actual intuition: and what is strictlycalled Remembrance is the reference of the image to an intuition − and that as a subsumption of theimmediate single intuition (impression) under what is in point of form universal, under the representation(idea) with the same content. Thus intelligence recognizes the specific sensation and the intuition of it aswhat is already its own − in them it is still within itself: at the same time it is aware that what is only its(primarily) internal image is also an immediate object of intuition, by which it is authenticated. The image,which in the mine of intelligence was only its property, now that it has been endued with externality, comesactually into its possession. And so the image is at once rendered distinguishable from the intuition andseparable from the blank night in which it was originally submerged. Intelligence is thus the force which cangive forth its property, and dispense with external intuition for its existence in it. This 'synthesis' of theinternal image with the recollected existence is representation proper: by this synthesis the internal now hasthe qualification of being able to be presented before intelligence and to have its existence in it.

(bb) Imagination(6)

¤ 455 (1) The intelligence which is active in this possession is the reproductive imagination, where theimages issue from the inward world belonging to the ego, which is now the power over them. The images arein the first instance referred to this external, immediate time and space which is treasured up along with them.But it is solely in the conscious subject, where it is treasured up, that the image has the individuality in whichthe features composing it are conjoined: whereas their original concretion, i.e. at first only in space and time,as a unit of intuition, has been broken up. The content reproduced, belonging as it does to the self−identicalunity of intelligence, and an out−put from its universal mine, has a general idea (representation) to supply thelink of association for the images which according to circumstances are more abstract or more concrete ideas.

The so−called laws of the association of ideas were objects of great interest, especially during that outburst ofempirical psychology which was contemporaneous with the decline of philosophy. In the first place, it is notIdeas (properly so called) which are associated. Secondly,.these modes of relation are not laws, just for thereason that there are so many laws about the same thing, as to suggest a caprice and a contingency opposed tothe very nature of law. It is a matter of chance whether the link of association is something pictorial, or anintellectual category, such as likeness and contrast, reason and consequence. The train of images andrepresentations suggested by association is the sport of vacant−minded ideation, where, though intelligenceshows itself by a certain formal universality, the matter is entirely pictorial. − Image and Idea, if we leave outof account the more precise definition of those forms given above, present also a distinction in content. Theformer is the more sensuously concrete idea, whereas the idea (representation), whatever be its content (fromimage, notion, or idea), has always the peculiarity, though belonging to intelligence, of being in respect of its

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content given and immediate. It is still true of this idea or representation, as of all intelligence, that it finds itsmaterial, as a matter of fact, to be so and so; and the universality which the aforesaid material receives byideation is still abstract. Mental representation is the mean in the syllogism of the elevation of intelligence,the link between the two significations of self−relatedness − viz. being and universality, which inconsciousness receive the title of object and subject. Intelligence complements what is merely found by theattribution of universality, and the internal and its own by the attribution of being, but a being of its owninstitution. (On the distinction of representations and thoughts, see Introduction to the Logic, ¤ 20 note.)

Abstraction, which occurs in the ideational activity by which general ideas are produced (and ideas qua ideasvirtually have the form of generality), is frequently explained as the incidence of many similar images oneupon another and is supposed to be thus made intelligible. If this superimposing is to be no mere accident andwithout principle, a force of attraction in like images must be assumed, or something of the sort, which at thesame time would have the negative power of rubbing off the dissimilar elements against each other. Thisforce is really intelligence itself − the self−identical ego which by its internalizing recollection gives theimages ipso facto generality, and subsumes the single intuition under the already internalized image (¤ 453).

¤ 456 Thus even the association of ideas is to be treated as a subsumption of the individual under theuniversal, which forms their connecting link. But here intelligence is more than merely a general form: itsinwardness is an internally definite, concrete subjectivity with a substance and value of its own, derived fromsome interest, some latent concept or Ideal principle, so far as we may by anticipation speak of such.Intelligence is the power which wields the stores of images and ideas belonging to it, and which thus (2)freely combines and subsumes these stores in obedience to its peculiar tenor. Such is creative imagination(7)− symbolic, allegoric, or poetical imagination − where the intelligence gets a definite embodiment in thisstore of ideas and informs them with its general tone. These more or less concrete, individualized creationsare still 'syntheses': for the material, in which the subjective principles and ideas get a mentally pictorialexistence, is derived from the data of intuition.

¤ 457 In creative imagination intelligence has been so far perfected as to need no aids for intuition. Itsself−sprung ideas have pictorial existence. This pictorial creation of its intuitive spontaneity is subjective −still lacks the side of existence. But as the creation unites the internal idea with the vehicle of materialization,intelligence has therein implicitly returned both to identical self−relation and to immediacy. As reason, itsfirst start was to appropriate the immediate datum in itself (¤¤ 445, 435), i.e. to universalize it; and now itsaction as reason (¤ 438) is from the present point directed towards giving the character of an existent to whatin it has been perfected to concrete auto−intuition. In other words, it aims at making itself be and be a fact.Acting on this view, it is self−uttering, intuition−producing: the imagination which creates signs.

Productive imagination is the centre in which the universal and being, one's own and what is picked up,internal and external, are completely welded into one. The preceding 'syntheses' of intuition, recollection,etc., are unifications of the same factors, but they are 'syntheses'; it is not till creative imagination thatintelligence ceases to be the vague mine and the universal, and becomes an individuality, a concretesubjectivity, in which the self−reference is defined both to being and to universality. The creations ofimagination are on all hands recognized as such combinations of the mind's own and inward with the matterof intuition; what further and more definite aspects they have is a matter for other departments. For thepresent this internal studio of intelligence is only to be looked at in these abstract aspects. − Imagination,when regarded as the agency of this unification, is reason, but only a nominal reason, because the matter ortheme it embodies is to imagination qua imagination a matter of indifference; whilst reason qua reason alsoinsists upon the truth of its content.

Another point calling for special notice is that, when imagination elevates the internal meaning to an imageand intuition, and this is expressed by saying that it gives the former the character of an existent, the phrasemust not seem surprising that intelligence makes itself be as a thing; for its ideal import is itself, and so is the

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aspect which it imposes upon it. The image produced by imagination of an object is a bare mental orsubjective intuition: in the sign or symbol it adds intuitability proper; and in mechanical memory itcompletes, so far as it is concerned, this form of being.

¤ 458 In this unity (initiated by intelligence) of an independent representation with an intuition, the matter ofthe latter is, in the first instance, something accepted, somewhat immediate or given (for example, the colourof the cockade, etc.). But in the fusion of the two elements, the intuition does not count positively or asrepresenting itself, but as representative of something else. It is an image, which has received as its soul andmeaning an independent mental representation. This intuition is the Sign.

The sign is some immediate intuition, representing a totally different import from what naturally belongs toit; it is the pyramid into which a foreign soul has been conveyed, and where it is conserved. The sign isdifferent from the symbol: for in the symbol the original characters (in essence and conception) of the visibleobject are more or less identical with the import which it bears as symbol; whereas in the sign, strictlyso−called, the natural attributes of the intuition, and the connotation of which it is a sign, have nothing to dowith each other. Intelligence therefore gives proof of wider choice and ampler authority in the use ofintuitions when it treats them as designatory (significative) rather than as symbolical.

In logic and psychology, signs and language are usually foisted in somewhere as an appendix, without anytrouble being taken to display their necessity and systematic place in the economy of intelligence. The rightplace for the sign is that just given: where intelligence − which as intuiting generates the form of time andspace, but appears as recipient of sensible matter, out of which it forms ideas − now gives its own originalideas a definite existence from itself, treating the intuition (or time and space as filled full) as its ownproperty, deleting the connotation which properly and naturally belongs to it, and conferring on it an otherconnotation as its soul and import. This sign−creating activity may be distinctively named 'productive'Memory (the primarily abstract 'Mnemosyne'); since memory, which in ordinary life is often used asinterchangeable and synonymous with remembrance (recollection), and even with conception andimagination, has always to do with signs only.

¤ 459 The intuition − in its natural phase a something given and given in space − acquires, when employed asa sign, the peculiar characteristic of existing only as superseded and sublimated. Such is the negativity ofintelligence; and thus the truer phase of the intuition used as a sign is existence in time (but its existencevanishes in the moment of being), and if we consider the rest of its external psychical quality, its institutionby intelligence, but an institution growing out of its (anthropological) own naturalness. This institution of thenatural is the vocal note, where the inward idea manifests itself in adequate utterance. The vocal note whichreceives further articulation to express specific ideas − speech and, its system, language − gives to sensations,intuitions, conceptions, a second and higher existence than they naturally possess − invests them with theright of existence in the ideational realm.

Language here comes under discussion only in the special aspect of a product of intelligence for manifestingits ideas in an external medium. If language had to be treated in its concrete nature, it would be necessary forits vocabulary or material part to recall the anthropological or psychophysiological point of view (¤ 401), andfor the grammar or formal portion to anticipate the standpoint of analytic understanding. With regard to theelementary material of language, while on one hand the theory of mere accident has disappeared, on the otherthe principle of imitation has been restricted to the slight range it actually covers − that of vocal objects. Yetone may still hear the German language praised for its wealth − that wealth consisting in its specialexpression for special sounds − Rauschen, Sausen, Knarren, etc.; − there have been collected more than ahundred such words, perhaps: the humour of the moment creates fresh ones when it pleases. Suchsuperabundance in the realm of sense and of triviality contributes nothing to form the real wealth of acultivated language. The strictly raw material of language itself depends more upon an inward symbolismthan a symbolism referring to external objects; it depends, i.e. on anthropological articulation, as it were the

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posture in the corporeal act of oral utterance. For each vowel and consonant accordingly, as well as for theirmore abstract elements (the posture of lips, palate, tongue in each) and for their combinations, people havetried to find the appropriate signification. But these dull subconscious beginnings are deprived of theiroriginal importance and prominence by new influences, it may be by external agencies or by the needs ofcivilization. Having been originally sensuous intuitions, they are reduced to signs, and thus have only tracesleft of their original meaning, if it be not altogether extinguished. As to the formal element, again, it is thework of analytic intellect which informs language with its categories: it is this logical instinct which givesrise to grammar. The study of languages still in their original state, which we have first really begun to makeacquaintance with in modern times, has shown on this point that they contain a very elaborate grammar andexpress distinctions which are lost or have been largely obliterated in the languages of more civilized nations.It seems as if the language of the most civilized nations has the most imperfect grammar, and that the samelanguage has a more perfect grammar when the nation is in a more uncivilized state than when it reaches ahigher civilization. (Cf. W. von Humboldt's Essay on the Dual.)

In speaking of vocal (which is the original) language, we may touch, only in passing, upon written languagesfurther development in the particular sphere of language which borrows the help of an externally practicalactivity. It is from the province of immediate spatial intuition to which written language proceeds that it takesand produces the signs (¤ 454). In particular, hieroglyphics uses spatial figures to designate ideas;alphabetical writing, on the other hand, uses them to designate vocal notes which are already signs.Alphabetical writing thus consists of signs of signs − the words or concrete signs of vocal language beinganalysed into their simple elements, which severally receive designation. − Leibniz's practical mind misledhim to exaggerate the advantages which a complete written language, formed on the hieroglyphic method(and hieroglyphics are used even where there is alphabetic writing, as in our signs for the numbers, theplanets, the chemical elements, etc.), would have as a universal language for the intercourse of nations andespecially of scholars. But we may be sure that it was rather the intercourse of nations (as was probably thecase in Phoenicia, and still takes place in Canton − see Macartney's Travels by Staunton) which occasionedthe need of alphabetical writing and led to its formation. At any rate a comprehensive hieroglyphic languagefor ever completed is impracticable. Sensible objects no doubt admit of permanent signs; but, as regards signsfor mental objects, the progress of thought and the continual development of logic lead to changes in theviews of their internal relations and thus also of their nature; and this would involve the rise of a newhieroglyphical denotation. Even in the case of sense−objects it happens that their names, i.e. their signs invocal language, are frequently changed, as, for example, in chemistry and mineralogy. Now that it has beenforgotten what names properly are, viz. externalities which of themselves have no sense, and only getsignification as signs, and now that, instead of names proper, people ask for terms expressing a sort ofdefinition, which is frequently changed capriciously and fortuitously, the denomination, i.e. the compositename formed of signs of their generic characters or other supposed characteristic properties, is altered inaccordance with the differences of view with regard to the genus or other supposed specific property. It isonly a stationary civilization, like the Chinese, which admits of the hieroglyphic language of that nation; andits method of writing moreover can only be the lot of that small part of a nation which is in exclusivepossession of mental culture. − The progress of the vocal language depends most closely on the habit ofalphabetical writing; by means of which only does vocal language acquire the precision and purity of itsarticulation. The imperfection of the Chinese vocal language is notorious: numbers of its words possessseveral utterly different meanings, as many as ten and twenty, so that, in speaking, the distinction is madeperceptible merely by accent and intensity, by speaking low and soft or crying out. The European, learning tospeak Chinese, falls into the most ridiculous blunders before he has mastered these absurd refinements ofaccentuation. Perfection here consists in the opposite of that parler sans accent which in Europe is justlyrequired of an educated speaker. The hieroglyphic mode of writing keeps the Chinese vocal language fromreaching that objective precision which is gained in articulation by alphabetic writing.

Alphabetic writing is on all accounts the more intelligent: in it the word − the mode, peculiar to the intellect,of uttering its ideas most worthily − is brought to consciousness and made an object of reflection. Engaging

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the attention of intelligence, as it does, it is analysed; the work of sign−making is reduced to its few simpleelements (the primary postures of articulation) in which the sense−factor in speech is brought to the form ofuniversality, at the same time that in this elementary phase it acquires complete precision and purity. Thusalphabetic writing retains at the same time the advantage of vocal language, that the ideas have names strictlyso called: the name is the simple sign for the exact idea, i.e. the simple plain idea, not decomposed into itsfeatures and compounded out of them. Hieroglyphics, instead of springing from the direct analysis of sensiblesigns, like alphabetic writing, arise from an antecedent analysis of ideas. Thus a theory readily arises that allideas may be reduced to their elements, or simple logical terms, so that from the elementary signs chosen toexpress these (as, in the case of the Chinese Koua, the simple straight stroke, and the stroke broken into twoparts) a hieroglyphic system would be generated by their composition. This feature of hieroglyphic − theanalytical designations of ideas − which misled Leibniz to regard it as preferable to alphabetic writing israther in antagonism with the fundamental desideratum of language − the name. To want a name means thatfor the immediate idea (which, however ample a connotation it may include, is still for the mind simple in thename), we require a simple immediate sign which for its own sake does not suggest anything, and has for itssole function to signify and represent sensibly the simple idea as such. It is not merely the image−loving andimage−limited intelligence that lingers over the simplicity of ideas and redintegrates them from the moreabstract factors into which they have been analysed: thought too reduces to the form of a simple thought theconcrete connotation which it 'resumes' and reunites from the mere aggregate of attributes to which analysishas reduced it. Both alike require such signs, simple in respect of their meaning: signs, which thoughconsisting of several letters or syllables and even decomposed into such, yet do not exhibit a combination ofseveral ideas. − What has been stated is the principle for settling the value of these written languages. It alsofollows that in hieroglyphics the relations of concrete mental ideas to one another must necessarily be tangledand perplexed, and that the analysis of these (and the proximate results of such analysis must again beanalysed) appears to be possible in the most various and divergent ways. Every divergence in analysis wouldgive rise to another formation of the written name; just as in modern times (as already noted, even in theregion of sense) muriatic acid has undergone several changes of name. A hieroglyphic written languagewould require a philosophy as stationary as is the civilization of the Chinese.

What has been said shows the inestimable and not sufficiently appreciated educational value of learning toread and write an alphabetic character. It leads the mind from the sensibly concrete image to attend to themore formal structure of the vocal word and its abstract elements, and contributes much to give stability andindependence to the inward realm of mental life. Acquired habit subsequently effaces the peculiarity bywhich alphabetic writing appears, in the interest of vision, as a roundabout way to ideas by means ofaudibility; it makes them a sort of hieroglyphic to us, so that in using them we need not consciously realizethem by means of tones, whereas people unpractised in reading utter aloud what they read in order to catch itsmeaning in the sound. Thus, while (with the faculty which transformed alphabetic writing into hieroglyphics)the capacity of abstraction gained by the first practice remains, hieroglyphic reading is of itself a deaf readingand a dumb writing. It is true that the audible (which is in time) and the visible (which is in space), each havetheir own basis, one no less authoritative than the other. But in the case of alphabetic writing there is only asingle basis: the two aspects occupy their rightful relation to each other: the visible language is related to thevocal only as a sign, and intelligence expresses itself immediately and unconditionally by speaking. − Theinstrumental function of the comparatively non−sensuous element of tone for all ideational work shows itselffurther as peculiarly important in memory which forms the passage from representation to thought.

¤ 460 The name, combining the intuition (an intellectual production) with its signification, is primarily asingle transient product; and conjunction of the idea (which is inward) with the intuition (which is outward) isitself outward. The reduction of this outwardness to inwardness is (verbal) Memory.

(cc) Memory(8)

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¤ 461 Under the shape of memory the course of intelligence passes through the same inwardizing(recollecting) functions, as regards the intuition of the word, as representation in general does in dealing withthe first immediate intuition (¤ 45l). (1) Making its own the synthesis achieved in the sign, intelligence, bythis inwardizing (memorizing) elevates the single synthesis to a universal, i.e. permanent, synthesis, in whichname and meaning are for it objectively united, and renders the intuition (which the name originally is) arepresentation. Thus the import (connotation) and sign, being identified, form one representation: therepresentation in its inwardness is rendered concrete and gets existence for its import: all this being the workof memory which retains names (retentive Memory).

¤ 462 The name is thus the thing so far as it exists and counts in the ideational realm. (2) In the name,Reproductive memory has and recognizes the thing, and with the thing it has the name, apart from intuitionand image. The name, as giving an existence to the content in intelligence, is the externality of intelligence toitself; and the inwardizing or recollection of the name, i.e. of an intuition of intellectual origin, is at the sametime a self−externalization to which intelligence reduces itself on its own ground. The association of theparticular names lies in the meaning of the features sensitive, representative, or cogitant − series of which theintelligence traverses as it feels, represents, or thinks.

Given the name lion, we need neither the actual vision of the animal, nor its image even: the name alone, ifwe understand it, is the unimaged simple representation. We think in names.

The recent attempts − already, as they deserved, forgotten − to rehabilitate the Mnemonic of the ancients,consist in transforming names into images, and thus again deposing memory to the level of imagination. Theplace of the power of memory is taken by a permanent tableau of a series of images, fixed in the imagination,to which is then attached the series of ideas forming the composition to be learned by rote. Considering theheterogeneity between the import of these ideas and those permanent images, and the speed with which theattachment has to be made, the attachment cannot be made otherwise than by shallow, silly, and utterlyaccidental links. Not merely is the mind put to the torture of being worried by idiotic stuff, but what is thuslearnt by rote is just as quickly forgotten, seeing that the same tableau is used for getting by rote every otherseries of ideas, and so those previously attached to it are effaced. What is mnemonically impressed is not likewhat is retained in memory really got by heart, i.e. strictly produced from within outwards, from the deep pitof the ego, and thus recited, but is, so to speak, read off the tableau of fancy. − Mnemonic is connected withthe common prepossession about memory, in comparison with fancy and imagination; as if the latter were ahigher and more intellectual activity than memory. On the contrary, memory has ceased to deal with an imagederived from intuition − the immediate and incomplete mode of intelligence; it has rather to do with an objectwhich is the product of intelligence itself − such a without−book(9) as remains locked up in thewithin−book(10) of intelligence, and is, within intelligence, only its outward and existing side.

¤ 463 (3) As the interconnection of the names lies in the meaning, the conjunction of their meaning with thereality as names is still an (external) synthesis; and intelligence in this its externality has not made a completeand simple return into self. But intelligence is the universal − the single plain truth of its particularself−divestments; and its consummated appropriation of them abolishes that distinction between meaning andname. This supreme inwardizing of representation is the supreme self−divestment of intelligence, in which itrenders itself the mere being, the universal space of names as such, i.e. of meaningless words. The ego, whichis this abstract being, is, because subjectivity, at the same time the power over the different names − the linkwhich, having nothing in itself, fixes in itself series of them and keeps them in stable order. So far as theymerely are, and intelligence is here itself this being of theirs, its power is a merely abstract subjectivity −memory; which, on account of the complete externality in which the members of such series stand to oneanother, and because it is itself this externality (subjective though that be), is called mechanical (¤ 195).

A composition is, as we know, not thoroughly conned by rote, until one attaches no meaning to the words.The recitation of what has been thus got by heart is therefore of course accentless. The correct accent, if it is

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introduced, suggests the meaning: but this introduction of the signification of an idea disturbs the mechanicalnexus and therefore easily throws out the reciter. The faculty of conning by rote series of words, with noprinciple governing their succession, or which are separately meaningless, for example, a series of propernames, is .so supremely marvellous, because it is t e very essence of mind to have its wits about it; whereas inthis case the mind is estranged in itself, and its action is like machinery. But it is only as uniting subjectivitywith objectivity that the mind has its wits about it. Whereas in the case before us, after it has in intuition beenat first so external as to pick up its facts ready made, and in representation inwardizes or recollects this datumand makes it its own − it proceeds as memory to make itself external in itself, so that what is its own assumesthe guise of something found. Thus one of the two dynamic factors of thought, viz. objectivity, is here put inintelligence itself as a quality of it. − It is only a step further to treat memory as mechanical − the actimplying no intelligence − in which case it is only justified by its uses, its indispensability perhaps for otherpurposes and functions of mind. But by so doing we overlook the proper signification it has in the mind.

¤ 464 If it is to be the fact and true objectivity, the mere name as an existent requires something else − to beinterpreted by the representing intellect. Now in the shape of mechanical memory, intelligence is at once thatexternal objectivity and the meaning. In this way intelligence is explicitly made an existence of this identity,i.e. it is explicitly active as such an identity which as reason it is implicitly. Memory is in this manner thepassage into the function of thought, which no longer has a meaning, i.e. its objectivity is no longer severedfrom the subjective, and its inwardness does not need to go outside for its existence.

The German language has etymologically assigned memory (Gedachtnis), of which it has become a foregoneconclusion to speak contemptuously, the high position of direct kindred with thought (Gedanke). − It is notmatter of chance that the young have a better memory than the old, nor is their memory solely exercised forthe sake of utility. The young have a good memory because they have not yet reached the stage of reflection;their memory is exercised with or without design so as to level the ground of their inner life to pure being orto pure space in which the fact, the implicit content, may reign and unfold itself with no antithesis to asubjective inwardness. Genuine ability is in youth generally combined with a good memory. But empiricalstatements of this sort help little towards a knowledge of what memory intrinsically is. To comprehend theposition and meaning of memory and to understand its organic interconnection with thought is one of thehardest points, and hitherto one quite unregarded in the theory of mind. Memory qua memory is itself themerely external mode, or merely existential aspect of thought, and thus needs a complementary element. Thepassage from it to thought is to our view or implicitly the identity of reason with this existential mode: anidentity from which it follows that reason only exists in a subject, and as the function of that subject. Thusactive reason is Thinking.

(c) Thinking(11)

¤ 465 Intelligence is recognitive: it cognizes an intuition, but only because that intuition is already its own (¤454); and in the name it rediscovers the fact (¤ 462): but now it finds its universal in the double significationof the universal as such, and of the universal as immediate or as being − finds that is the genuine universalwhich is its own unity overlapping and including its other, viz. being. Thus intelligence is explicitly, and onits own part cognitive: virtually it is the universal − its product (the thought) is the thing: it is a plain identityof subjective and objective. It knows that what is thought, is, and that what is, only is in so far as it is athought (¤¤ 5, 21); the thinking of intelligence is to have thoughts: these are as its content and object.

¤ 466 But cognition by thought is still in the first instance formal: the universality and its being is the plainsubjectivity of intelligence. The thoughts therefore are not yet fully and freely determinate, and therepresentations which have been inwardized to thoughts are so far still the given content.

¤ 467 As dealing with this given content, thought is (a) understanding with its formal identity, working up therepresentations, that have been memorized, into species, genera, laws, forces, etc., in short into categories −

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thus indicating that the raw material does not get the truth of its being save in these thought−forms. Asintrinsically infinite negativity, thought is (b) essentially an act of partition − judgement, which, however,does not break up the concept again into the old antithesis of universality and being, but distinguishes on thelines supplied by the interconnections peculiar to the concept. Thirdly (c), thought supersedes the formaldistinction and institutes at the same time an identity of the differences − thus being nominal reason orinferential understanding. Intelligence, as the act of thought, cognizes. And (a) understanding out of itsgeneralities (the categories) explains the individual, and is then said to comprehend or understand itself: (b) inthe judgement it explains the individual to be a universal (species, genus). In these forms the content appearsas given: (c) but in inference (syllogism) it characterizes a content from itself, by superseding thatform−difference. With the perception of the necessity, the last immediacy still attaching to formal thoughthas vanished.

In Logic there was thought, but in its implicitness, and as reason develops itself in this distinction−lackingmedium. So in consciousness thought occurs as a stage (¤ 437 note). Here reason is as the truth of theantithetical distinction, as it had taken shape within the mind's own limits. Thought thus recurs again andagain in these different parts of philosophy, because these parts are different only through the medium theyare in and the antitheses they imply; while thought is this one and the same centre, to which as to their truththe antitheses return.

¤ 468 Intelligence which as theoretical appropriates an immediate mode of being, is, now that it hascompleted taking possession, in its own property: the last negation of immediacy has implicitly required thatthe intelligence shall itself determine its content. Thus thought, as free notion, is now also free in point ofcontent. But when intelligence is aware that it is determinative of the content, which is its mode no less thanit is a mode of being, it is Will.

(b) MIND PRACTICAL(12)

¤ 469 As will, the mind is aware that it is the author of its own conclusions, the origin of its self−fulfilment.Thus fulfilled, this independency or individuality forms the side of existence or of reality for the Idea ofmind. As will, the mind steps into actuality; whereas as cognition it is on the soil of notional generality.Supplying its own content, the will is self−possessed, and in the widest sense free: this is its characteristictrait. Its finitude lies in the formalism that the spontaneity of its self−fulfilment means no more than a generaland abstract ownness, not yet identified with matured reason. It is the function of the essential will to bringliberty to exist in the formal will, and it is therefore the aim of that formal will to fill itself with its essentialnature, i.e. to make liberty its pervading character, content, and aim, as well as its sphere of existence. Theessential freedom of will is, and must always be, a thought: hence the way by which will can make itselfobjective mind is to rise to be a thinking will − to give itself the content which it can only have as it thinksitself.

True liberty, in the shape of moral life, consists in the will finding its purpose in a universal content, not insubjective or selfish interests. But such a content is only possible in thought and through thought: it is nothingshort of absurd to seek to banish thought from the moral, religious, and law−abiding life.

¤ 470 Practical mind, considered at first as formal or immediate will, contains a double ought − (1) in thecontrast which the new mode of being projected outward by the will offers to the immediate positivity of itsold existence and condition − an antagonism which in consciousness grows to correlation with externalobjects. (2) That first self−determination, being itself immediate, is not at once elevated into a thinkinguniversality: the latter, therefore, virtually constitutes an obligation on the former in point of form, as it mayalso constitute it in point of matter; − a distinction which only exists for the observer.

(a) Practical Sense or Feeling(13)

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¤ 471 The autonomy of the practical mind at first is immediate and therefore formal, i.e. it finds itself as anindividuality determined in its inward nature. It is thus 'practical feeling', or instinct of action. In this phase,as it is at bottom a subjectivity simply identical with reason, it has no doubt a rational content, but a contentwhich as it stands is individual, and for that reason also natural, contingent and subjective − a content whichmay be determined quite as much by mere personalities of want and opinion, etc., and by the subjectivitywhich selfishly sets itself against the universal, as it may be virtually in conformity with reason.

An appeal is sometimes made to the sense (feeling) of right and morality, as well as of religion, which man isalleged to possess − to his benevolent dispositions − and even to his heart generally − i.e. to the subject so faras the various practical feelings are in it all combined. So far as this appeal implies (1) that these ideas areimmanent in his own self, and (2) that when feeling is opposed to the logical understanding, it, and not thepartial abstractions of the latter, may be the totality − the appeal has a legitimate meaning. But on the otherhand, feeling too may be one−sided, unessential, and bad. The rational, which exists in the shape ofrationality when it is apprehended by thought, is the same content as the good practical feeling has, butpresented in its universality and necessity, in its objectivity and truth.

Thus it is, on the one hand, silly to suppose that in the passage from feeling to law and duty there is any lossof import and excellence; it is this passage which lets feeling first reach its truth. It is equally silly to considerintellect as superfluous or even harmful to feeling, heart, and will; the truth and, what is the same thing, theactual rationality of the heart and will can only be at home in the universality of intellect, and not in thesingleness of feeling as feeling. If feelings are of the right sort, it is because of their quality or content −which is right only so far as it is intrinsically universal or has its source in the thinking mind. The difficultyfor the logical intellect consists in throwing off the separation it has arbitrarily imposed between the severalfaculties of feeling and thinking mind, and coming to see that in the human being there is only one reason, infeeling, volition, and thought. Another difficulty connected with this is found in the fact that the Ideas whichare the special property of the thinking mind, namely God, law and morality, can also be felt. But feeling isonly the form of the immediate and peculiar individuality of the subject, in which these facts, like any otherobjective facts (which consciousness also sets over against itself), may be placed.

On the other hand, it is suspicious or even worse to cling to feeling and heart in place of the intelligentrationality of law, right, and duty; because all that the former holds more than the latter is only the particularsubjectivity with its vanity and caprice. For the same reason it is out of place in a scientific treatment of thefeelings to deal with anything beyond their form, and to discuss their content; for the latter, when thought, isprecisely what constitutes, in their universality and necessity, the rights and duties which are the true worksof mental autonomy. So long as we study practical feelings and dispositions specially, we have only to dealwith the selfish, bad, and evil; it is these alone which belong to the individuality which retains its oppositionto the universal: their content is the reverse of rights and duties, and precisely in that way do they − but onlyin antithesis to the latter − retain a speciality of their own.

¤ 472 The 'Ought' of practical feeling is the claim of its essential autonomy to control some existing mode offact − which is assumed to be worth nothing save as adapted to that claim. But as both, in their immediacy,lack objective determination, this relation of the requirement to existent fact is the utterly subjective andsuperficial feeling of pleasant or unpleasant.

Delight, joy, grief, etc., shame, repentance, contentment, etc., are partly only modifications of the formal'practical feeling' in general, but are partly different in the features that give the special tone and charactermode to their 'Ought'.

The celebrated question as to the origin of evil in the world, so far at least as evil is understood to mean whatis disagreeable and painful merely, arises on this stage of the formal practical feeling. Evil is nothing but theincompatibility between what is and what ought to be. 'Ought' is an ambiguous term − indeed infinitely so,

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considering that casual aims may also come under the form of Ought. But where the objects sought are thuscasual, evil only executes what is rightfully due to the vanity and nullity of their planning: for theythemselves were radically evil. The finitude of life and mind is seen in their judgement: the contrary which isseparated from them they also have as a negative in them, and thus they are the contradiction called evil. Inthe lifeless there is neither evil nor pain: for in inorganic nature the intelligible unity (concept) does notconfront its existence and does not in the difference at the same time remain its permanent subject. Whereasin life, and still more in mind, we have this immanent distinction present: hence arises the Ought: and thisnegativity, subjectivity, ego, freedom are the principles of evil and pain. Jacob Bohme viewed egoity(selfhood) as pain and torment, and as the fountain of nature and of spirit.

(b) The Impulses and Choice(14)

¤ 473 The practical ought is a 'real' judgement. Will, which is essentially self−determination, finds in theconformity − as immediate and merely found to hand − of the existing mode to its requirement a negation,and something inappropriate to it. If the will is to satisfy itself, if the implicit unity of the universality and thespecial mode is to be realized, the conformity of its inner requirement and of the existent thing ought to be itsact and institution. The will, as regards the form of its content, is at first still a natural will, directly identicalwith its specific mode: − natural impulse and inclination. Should, however, the totality of the practical spiritthrow itself into a single one of the many restricted forms of impulse, each being always in conflict toanother, it is passion.

¤ 474 Inclinations and passions embody the same constituent features as the practical feeling. Thus, while, onone hand, they are based on the rational nature of the mind; they, on the other, as part and parcel of the stillsubjective and single will, are infected with contingency, and appear as particular to stand to the individualand to each other in an external relation and with a necessity which creates bondage.

The special note in passion is its restriction to one special mode of volition, in which the whole subjectivityof the individual is merged, be the value of that mode what it may. In consequence of this formalism, passionis neither good nor bad; the title only states that a subject has thrown his whole soul − his interests ofintellect, talent, character, enjoyment − on one aim and object. Nothing great has been and nothing great canbe accomplished without passion. It is only a dead, too often, indeed, a hypocritical moralizing whichinveighs against the form of passion as such.

But with regard to the inclinations, the question is directly raised, Which are good and bad? − Up to whatdegree the good continue good; − and (as there are many, each with its private range). In what way have they,being all in one subject and hardly all, as experience shows, admitting of gratification, to suffer at leastreciprocal restriction? And, first of all, as regards the numbers of these impulses and propensities, the case ismuch the same as with the psychical powers, whose aggregate is to form the mind theoretical − an aggregatewhich is now increased by the host of impulses. The nominal rationality of impulse and propensity liesmerely in their general impulse not to be subjective merely, but to get realized, overcoming the subjectivityby the subject's own agency. Their genuine rationality cannot reveal its secret to a method of outer reflectionwhich pre−supposes a number of independent innate tendencies and immediate instincts, and therefore iswanting in a single principle and final purpose for them. But the immanent 'reflection' of mind itself carries itbeyond their particularity and their natural immediacy, and gives their contents a rationality and objectivity,in which they exist as necessary ties of social relation, as rights and duties. It is this objectification whichevinces their real value, their mutual connections, and their truth. And thus it was a true perception whenPlato (especially including as he did the mind's whole nature under its right) showed that the full reality ofjustice could be exhibited only in the objective phase of justice, namely in the construction of the State as theethical life.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


The answer to the question, therefore, What are the good and rational propensities, and how they are to becoordinated with each other? resolves itself into an exposition of the laws and forms of common lifeproduced by the mind when developing itself as objective mind − a development in which the content ofautonomous action loses its contingency and optionality. The discussion of the true intrinsic worth of theimpulses, inclinations, and passions is thus essentially the theory of legal, moral, and social duties.

¤ 475 The subject is the act of satisfying impulses, an act of (at least) formal rationality, as it translates themfrom the subjectivity of content (which so far is purpose) into objectivity, where the subject is made to closewith itself. If the content of the impulse is distinguished as the thing or business from this act of carrying itout, and we regard the thing which has been brought to pass as containing the element of subjectiveindividuality and its action, this is what is called the interest. Nothing therefore is brought about withoutinterest.

An action is an aim of the subject, and it is his agency too which executes this aim: unless the subject were inthis way even in the most disinterested action, i.e. unless he had an interest in it, there would be no action atall. − The impulses and inclinations are sometimes depreciated by being contrasted with the baseless chimeraof a happiness, the free gift of nature, where wants are supposed to find their satisfaction without the agentdoing anything to produce a conformity between immediate existence and his own inner requirements. Theyare sometimes contrasted, on the whole to their disadvantage, with the morality of duty for duty's sake. Butimpulse and passion are the very life−blood of all action: they are needed if the agent is really to be in his aimand the execution thereof. The morality concerns the content of the aim, which as such is the universal, aninactive thing, that finds its actualizing in the agent; and finds it only when the aim is immanent in the agent,is his interest and − should it claim to engross his whole efficient subjectivity − his passion.

¤ 476 The will, as thinking and implicitly free, distinguishes itself from the particularity of the impulses, andplaces itself as simple subjectivity of thought above their diversified content. It is thus 'reflecting' will.

¤ 477 Such a particularity of impulse has thus ceased to be a mere datum: the reflective will now sees it as itsown, because it closes with it and thus gives itself specific individuality and actuality. It is now on thestandpoint of choosing between inclinations, and is option or choice.

¤ 478 Will as choice claims to be free, reflected into itself as the negativity of its merely immediateautonomy. However, as the content, in which its former universality concludes itself to actuality, is nothingbut the content of the impulses and appetites, it is actual only as a subjective and contingent will. It realizesitself in a particularity, which it regards at the same time as a nullity, and finds a satisfaction in what it has atthe same time emerged from. As thus contradictory, it is the process of distraction and of suspending onedesire or enjoyment by another − and one satisfaction, which is just as much no satisfaction, by another,without end. But the truth of the particular satisfactions is the universal, which under the name of happinessthe thinking will makes its aim.

(c) Happiness(15)

¤ 479 In this idea, which reflection and comparison have educed, of a universal satisfaction, the impulses, sofar as their particularity goes, are reduced to a mere negative; and it is held that partly they are to besacrificed to each other for the behoof of that aim, partly sacrificed to that aim directly, either altogether or inpart. Their mutual limitation, on one hand, proceeds from a mixture of qualitative and quantitativeconsiderations: on the other hand, as happiness has its sole affirmative contents in the springs of action, it ison them that the decision turns, and it is the subjective feeling and good pleasure which must have the castingvote as to where happiness is to be placed.

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¤ 480 Happiness is the mere abstract and merely imagined universality of things desired − a universalitywhich only ought to be. But the particularity of the satisfaction which just as much is as it is abolished, andthe abstract singleness, the option which gives or does not give itself (as it pleases) an aim in happiness, findtheir truth in the intrinsic universality of the will, i.e. its very autonomy or freedom. In this way choice is willonly as pure subjectivity, which is pure and concrete at once, by having for its contents and aim only thatinfinite mode of being − freedom itself. In this truth of its autonomy where concept and object are one, thewill is an actually free will.

(c) FREE MIND(16)

¤ 481 Actual free will is the unity of theoretical and practical mind: a free will, which realizes its ownfreedom of will, now that the formalism, fortuitousness, and contractedness of the practical content up to thispoint have been superseded. By superseding the adjustments of means therein contained, the will is theimmediate individuality self−instituted − an individuality, however, also purified of all that interferes with itsuniversalism, i.e. with freedom itself. This universalism the will has as its object and aim, only so far as itthinks itself, knows this its concept, and is will as free intelligence.

¤ 482 The mind which knows itself as free and wills itself as this its object, i.e. which has its true being forcharacteristic and aim, is in the first instance the rational will in general, or implicit Idea, and because implicitonly the notion of absolute mind. As abstract Idea again, it is existent only in the immediate will − it is theexistential side of reason − the single will as aware of this its universality constituting its contents and aim,and of which it is only the formal activity. If the will, therefore, in which the Idea thus appears is only finite,that will is also the act of developing the Idea, and of investing its self−unfolding content with an existencewhich, as realizing the idea, is actuality. It is thus 'Objective' Mind.

No Idea is so generally recognized as indefinite, ambiguous, and open to the greatest misconceptions (towhich therefore it actually falls a victim) as the idea of Liberty: none in common currency with so littleappreciation of its meaning. Remembering that free mind is actual mind, we can see how misconceptionsabout it are of tremendous consequence in practice. When individuals and nations have once got in theirheads the abstract concept of full−blown liberty, there is nothing like it in its uncontrollable strength, justbecause it is the very essence of mind, and that as its very actuality. Whole continents, Africa and the East,have never had this Idea, and are without it still. The Greeks and Romans, Plato and Aristotle, even theStoics, did not have it. On the contrary, they saw that it is only by birth (as, for example, an Athenian orSpartan citizen), or by strength of character, education, or philosophy (− the sage is free even as a slave andin chains) that the human being is actually free. It was through Christianity that this Idea came into the world.According to Christianity, the individual as such has an infinite value as the object and aim of divine love,destined as mind to live in absolute relationship with God himself, and have God's mind dwelling in

him: i.e. man is implicitly destined to supreme freedom. If, in religion as such, man is aware of thisrelationship to the absolute mind as his true being, he has also, even when he steps into the sphere of secularexistence, the divine mind present with him, as the substance of the state, of the family, etc. These institutionsare due to the guidance of that spirit, and are constituted after its measure; whilst by their existence the moraltemper comes to be indwelling in the individual, so that in this sphere of particular existence, of presentsensation and volition, he is actually free.

If to be aware of the Idea − to be aware, that is, that men are aware of freedom as their essence, aim, andobject − is matter of speculation, still this very Idea itself is the actuality of men − not something which theyhave, as men, but which they are. Christianity in its adherents has realized an ever−present sense that they arenot and cannot be slaves; if they are made slaves, if the decision as regards their property rests with anarbitrary will, not with laws or courts of justice, they would find the very substance of their life outraged.This will to liberty is no longer an impulse which demands its satisfaction, but the permanent character − the

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spiritual consciousness grown into a non−impulsive nature. But this freedom, which the content and aim offreedom has, is itself only a notion − a principle of the mind and heart, intended to develop into an objectivephase, into legal, moral, religious, and not less into scientific actuality.

1. Der Geist

2. Die Intelligenz.

3. Anschauung.

4. Vorstellung.

5. Die Erinnerung

6. Die Einbildungskraft.

7. Phantasie

8. Gedachtnis.

9. Auswendiges.

10. Inwendiges.

11. Das Denken.

12. Der praktische Geist

13. Das praktische Gefuhl.

14. Die Triebe und die Willkuhr.

15. Die Gluckseligkeit.

16. Der freie Geist.

SECTION TWO: MIND OBJECTIVE

¤ 483 The objective Mind is the absolute Idea, but only existing in posse: and as it is thus on the territory offinitude, its actual rationality retains the aspect of external apparency. The free will finds itself immediatelyconfronted by differences which arise from the circumstance that freedom is its inward function and aim, andis in relation to an external and already subsisting objectivity, which splits up into different heads: viz.anthropological data (i.e. private and personal needs), external things of nature which exist for consciousness,and the ties of relation between individual wills which are conscious of their own diversity and particularity.These aspects constitute the external material for the embodiment of the will.

¤ 484 But the purposive action of this will is to realize its concept, Liberty, in these externally objectiveaspects, making the latter a world moulded by the former, which in it is thus at home with itself, lockedtogether with it: the concept accordingly perfected to the Idea. Liberty, shaped into the actuality of a world,receives the form of Necessity, the deeper substantial nexus of which is the system or organization of the

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principles of liberty, whilst its phenomenal nexus is power or authority, and the sentiment of obedienceawakened in consciousness.

¤ 485 This unity of the rational will with the single will (this being the peculiar and immediate medium inwhich the former is actualized) constitutes the simple actuality of liberty. As it (and its content) belongs tothought, and is the virtual universal, the content has its right and true character only in the form ofuniversality. When invested with this character for the intelligent consciousness, or instituted as anauthoritative power, it is a Law.(1) When, on the other hand, the content is freed from the mixedness andfortuitousness, attaching to it in the practical feeling and in impulse, and is set and grafted in the individualwill, not in the form of impulse, but in its universality, so as to become its habit, temper, and character, itexists as manner and custom, or Usage.(2)

¤ 486 This 'reality', in general, where free will has existence, is the Law (Right) − the term being taken in acomprehensive sense not merely as the limited juristic law, but as the actual body of all the conditions offreedom. These conditions, in relation to the subjective will, where they, being universal, ought to have andcan only have their existence, are its Duties; whereas as its temper and habit they are Manners. What is aright is also a duty, and what is a duty, is also a right. For a mode of existence is a right, only as aconsequence of the free substantial will: and the same content of fact, when referred to the will distinguishedas subjective and individual, is a duty. It is the same content which the subjective consciousness recognizes asa duty, and brings into existence in these several wills. The finitude of the objective will thus creates thesemblance of a distinction between rights and duties.

In the phenomenal range right and duty are correlata, at least in the sense that to a right on my partcorresponds a duty in someone else. But, in the light of the concept, my right to a thing is not merelypossession, but as possession by a person it is property, or legal possession, and it is a duty to possess thingsas property, i.e. to be as a person. Translated into the phenomenal relationship, viz. relation to another person− this grows into the duty of someone else to respect my right. In the morality of the conscience, duty ingeneral is in me − a free subject − at the same time a right of my subjective will or disposition. But in thisindividualist moral sphere, there arises the division between what is only inward purpose (disposition orintention), which only has its being in me and is merely subjective duty, and the actualization of that purpose:and with this division a contingency and imperfection which makes the inadequacy of mere individualisticmorality. In social ethics these two parts have reached their truth, their absolute unity; although even rightand duty return to one another and combine by means of certain adjustments and under the guise of necessity.The rights of the father of the family over its members are equally duties towards them; just as the children'sduty of obedience is their right to be educated to the liberty of manhood. The penal judicature of agovernment, its rights of administration, etc., are no less its duties to punish, to administer, etc.; as theservices of the members of the State in dues, military service, etc., are duties and yet their right to theprotection of their private property and of the general substantial life in which they have their root. All theaims of society and the State are the private aims of the individuals. But the set of adjustments, by which theirduties come back to them as the exercise and enjoyment of right, produces an appearance of diversity: andthis diversity is increased by the variety of shapes which value assumes in the course of exchange, though itremains intrinsically the same. Still it holds fundamentally good that he who has no rights has no duties andvice versa.

Subdivision

¤ 487 The free will is:

(A) Itself at first immediate, and hence as a single being − the person: the existence which the person gives toits liberty is property. The Right as Right (law) is formal, abstract right.

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SECTION TWO: MIND OBJECTIVE 42

(B) When the will is reflected into self, so as to have its existence inside it, and to be thus at the same timecharacterized as a particular, it is the right of the subjective will, morality of the individual conscience.

(C) When the free will is the substantial will, made actual in the subject and conformable to its concept andrendered a totality of necessity − it is the ethics of actual life in family, civil society, and State.

1. Gesetz

2. Sitte

A. LAW(1)

(a) PROPERTY

¤ 488 Mind, in the immediacy of its self−secured liberty, is an individual, but one that knows its individualityas an absolutely free will: it is a person, in whom the inward sense of this freedom, as in itself still abstractand empty, has its particularity and fulfilment not yet on its own part, but on an external thing. This thing, assomething devoid of will, has no rights against the subjectivity of intelligence and volition, and is by thatsubjectivity made adjectival to it, the external sphere of its liberty − possession.

¤ 489 By the judgement of possession, at first in the outward appropriation, the thing acquires the predicateof 'mine'. But this predicate, on its own account merely 'practical', has here the signification that I import mypersonal will into the thing. As so characterized, possession is property, which as possession is a means, butas existence of the personality is an end.

¤ 490 In his property the person is brought into union with himself. But the thing is an abstractly externalthing, and the I in it is abstractly external. The concrete return of me into me in the externality is that I, theinfinite self−relation, am as a person the repulsion of me from myself, and have the existence of mypersonality in the being of other persons, in my relation to them and in my recognition by them, which is thusmutual.

¤ 491 The thing is the mean by which the extremes meet in one. These extremes are the persons who, in theknowledge of their identity as free, are simultaneously mutually independent. For them my will has itsdefinite recognizable existence in the thing by the immediate bodily act of taking possession, or by theformation of the thing or, it may be, by mere designation of it.

¤ 492 The casual aspect of property is that I place my will in this thing: so far my will is arbitrary, I can justas well put it in it as not − just as well withdraw it as not. But so far as my will lies in a thing, it is only I whocan withdraw it: it is only with my will that the thing can pass to another, whose property it similarlybecomes only with his will: − Contract.

(b) CONTRACT

¤ 493 The two wills and their agreement in the contract are as an internal state of mind different from itsrealization in the performance. The comparatively 'ideal' utterance (of contract) in the stipulation contains theactual surrender of a property by the one, its changing hands, and its acceptance by the other will. Thecontract is thus thoroughly binding: it does not need the performance of the one or the other to become so −otherwise we should have an infinite regress or infinite division of thing, labour, and time. The utterance inthe stipulation is complete and exhaustive. The inwardness of the will which surrenders and the will whichaccepts the property is in the realm of ideation, and in that realm the word is deed and thing (¤ 462) − the full

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A. LAW(1) 43

and complete deed, since here the conscientiousness of the will does not come under consideration (as towhether the thing is meant in earnest or is a deception), and the will refers only to the external thing.

¤ 494 Thus in the stipulation we have the substantial being of the contract standing out in distinction from itsreal utterance in the performance, which is brought down to a mere sequel. In this way there is put into thething or performance a distinction between its immediate specific quality and its substantial being or value,meaning by value the quantitative terms into which that qualitative feature has been translated. One piece ofproperty is thus made comparable with another, and may be made equivalent to a thing which is (in quality)wholly heterogeneous. It is thus treated in geneal as an abstract, universal thing or commodity.

¤ 495 The contract, as an agreement which has a voluntary origin and deals with a casual commodity,involves at the same time the giving to this 'accidental' will a positive fixity. This will may just as well not beconformable to law (right), and, in that case, produces a wrong: by which, however, the absolute law (right) isnot superseded, but only a relationship originated of right to wrong.

(c) RIGHT versus WRONG

¤ 496 Law (right) considered as the realization of liberty in externals, breaks up into a multiplicity ofrelations to this external sphere and to other persons (¤¤ 491, 493 seqq.). In this way there are (1) severaltitles or grounds at law, of which (seeing that property both on the personal and the real side is exclusivelyindividual) only one is the right, but which, because they face each other, each and all are invested with ashow of right, against which the former is defined as the intrinsically right.

¤ 497 Now so long as (compared against this show) the one intrinsically right, still presumed identical withthe several titles, is affirmed, willed, and recognized, the only diversity lies in this, that the special thing issubsumed under the one law or right by the particular will of these several persons. This is naive,non−malicious wrong. Such wrong in the several claimants is a simple negative judgement, expressing thecivil suit. To settle it there is required a third judgement, which, as the judgement of the intrinsically right, isdisinterested, and a power of giving the one right existence as against that semblance.

¤ 498 But (2) if the semblance of right as such is willed against the right intrinsically by the particular will,which thus becomes wicked, then the external recognition of right is separated from the right's true value; andwhile the former only is respected, the latter is violated. This gives the wrong of fraud − the infinitejudgement as identical (¤173) − where the nominal relation is retained, but the sterling value is let slip.

¤ 499 (3) Finally, the particular will sets itself in opposition to the intrinsic right by negating that right itselfas well as its recognition or semblance. (Here there is a negatively infinite judgement (¤ 173) in which thereis denied the class as a whole, and not merely the particular mode − in this case the apparent recognition.)Thus the will is violently wicked, and commits a crime.

¤ 500 As an outrage on right, such an action is essentially and actually null. In it the agent, as a volitional andintelligent being, sets up a law − a law, however, which is nominal and recognized by him only − a universalwhich holds good for him, and under which he has at the same time subsumed himself by his action. Todisplay the nullity of such an act, to carry out simultaneously this nominal law and the intrinsic right, in thefirst instance by means of a subjective individual will, is the work of Revenge. But revenge, starting from theinterest of an immediate particular personality, is at the same time only a new outrage; and so on without end.This progression, like the last, abolishes itself in a third judgement, which is disinterested − punishment.

¤ 501 The instrumentality by which authority is given to intrinsic right is () that a particular will, that of thejudge, being conformable to the right, has an interest to turn against the crime (which in the first instance, inrevenge, is a matter of chance), and () that an executive power (also in the first instance casual) negates the

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A. LAW(1) 44

negation of right that was created by the criminal. This negation of right has its existence in the will of thecriminal; and consequently revenge or punishment directs itself against the person or property of the criminaland exercises coercion upon him. It is in this legal sphere that coercion in general has possible scope −compulsion against the thing, in seizing and maintaining it against another's seizure: for in this sphere the willhas its existence immediately in externals as such, or in corporeity, and can be seized only in this quarter. Butmore than possible compulsion is not, so long as I can withdraw myself as free from every mode of existence,even from the range of all existence, i.e. from life. It is legal only as abolishing a first and originalcompulsion.

¤ 502 A distinction has thus emerged between the law (right) and the subjective will. The 'reality' of right,which the personal will in the first instance gives itself in immediate wise, is seen to be due to theinstrumentality of the subjective will − whose influence as on one hand it gives existence to the essentialright, so may on the other cut itself off from and oppose itself to it. Conversely, the claim of the subjectivewill to be in this abstraction a power over the law of right is null and empty of itself: it gets truth and realityessentially only so far as that will in itself realises the reasonable will. As such it is morality(2) proper.

The phrase 'Law of Nature', or Natural Right,(3) in use for the philosophy of law involves the ambiguity thatit may mean either right as something existing ready−formed in nature, or right as governed by the nature ofthings, i.e. by the notion. The former used to be the common meaning, accompanied with the fiction of a stateof nature, in which the law of nature should hold sway; whereas the social and political state rather requiredand implied a restriction of liberty and a sacrifice of natural rights. The real fact is that the whole law and itsevery article are based on free personality alone − on self−determination or autonomy, which is the verycontrary of determination by nature. The law of nature − strictly so called − is for that reason thepredominance of the strong and the reign of force, and a state of nature a state of violence and wrong, ofwhich nothing truer can be said than that one ought to depart from it. The social state, on the other hand, isthe condition in which alone right has its actuality: what is to be restricted and sacrificed is just the wilfulnessand violence of the state of nature.

1. Das Recht.

2. Moralitat

3. Naturrecht.

B. THE MORALITY OF CONSCIENCE(1)

¤ 503 The free individual, who, in mere law, counts only as a person, is now characterized as a subject − awill reflected into itself so that, be its affection what it may, it is distinguished (as existing in it) as its ownfrom the existence of freedom in an external thing. Because the affection of the will is thus inwardized, thewill is at the same time made a particular, and there arise further particularizations of it and relations of theseto one another. This affection is partly the essential and implicit will, the reason of the will, the essential basisof law and moral life: partly it is the existent volition, which is before us and throws itself into actual deeds,and thus comes into relationship with the former. The subjective will is morally free, so far as these featuresare its inward institution, its own, and willed by it. Its utterance in deed with this freedom is an action, in theexternality of which it only admits as its own, and allows to be imputed to it, so much as it has consciouslywilled.

This subjective or 'moral' freedom is what a European especially calls freedom. In virtue of the right thereto aman must possess a personal knowledge of the distinction between good and evil in general: ethical andreligious principles shall not merely lay their claim on him as external laws and precepts of authority to be

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

B. THE MORALITY OF CONSCIENCE(1) 45

obeyed, but have their assent, recognition, or even justification in his heart, sentiment, conscience,intelligence, etc. The subjectivity of the will in itself is its supreme aim and absolutely essential to it.

The 'moral' must be taken in the wider sense in which it does not signify the morally good merely. In Frenchle moral is opposed to le physique, and means the mental or intellectual in general. But here the moralsignifies volitional mode, so far as it is in the interior of the will in general; it thus includes purpose andintention − and also moral wickedness.

(a) PURPOSE(2)

¤ 504 So far as the action comes into immediate touch with existence, my part in it is to this extent formal,that external existence is also independent of the agent. This externally can pervert his action and bring tolight something else than lay in it. Now, though any alteration as such, which is set on foot by the subjects'action, is its deed,(3) still the subject does not for that reason recognize it as its action,(4) but only adrnits asits own that existence in the deed which lay in its knowledge and will, which was its purpose. Only for thatdoes it hold itself responsible.

(b) INTENTION AND WELFARE(5)

¤ 505 As regards its empirically concrete content (1) the action has a variety of particular aspects andconnections. In point of form, the agent must have known and willed the action in its essential feature,embracing these individual points. This is the right of intention. While purpose affects only the immediatefact of existence, intention regards the underlying essence and aim thereof. (2) The agent has no less the rightto see that the particularity of content in the action, in point of its matter, is not something external to him, butis a particularity of his own − that it contains his needs, interests, and aims. These aims, when similarlycomprehended in a single aim, as in happiness (¤ 479), constitute his well−being. This is the right towell−being. Happiness (good fortune) is distinguished from well− being only in this, that happiness impliesno more than some sort of immediate existence, whereas well−being is regarded as having a moraljustification.

¤ 506 But the essentiality of the intention is in the first instance the abstract form of generality. Reflection canput in this form this and that particular aspect in the empirically concrete action, thus making it essential tothe intention or restricting the intention to it. In this way the supposed essentiality of the intention and the realessentiality of the action may be brought into the greatest contradiction − e.g. a good intention in case of acrime. Similarly well−being is abstract and may be placed in this or that: as appertaining to this single agent,it is always something particular.

(c) GOODNESS AND WICKEDNESS(6)

¤ 507 The truth of these particularities and the concrete unity of their formalism is the content of theuniversal, essential and actual, will − the law and underlying essence of every phase of volition, the essentialand actual good. It is thus the absolute final aim of the world, and duty for the agent who ought to haveinsight into the good, make it his intention and bring it about by his activity.

¤ 508 But though the good is the universal of will − a universal determined in itself − and thus including in itparticularity − still so far as this particularity is in the first instance still abstract, there is no principle at handto determine it. Such determination therefore starts up also outside that universal; and as heteronomy ordeterminance of a will which is free and has rights of its own, there awakes here the deepest contradiction. (a)In consequence of the indeterminate determinism of the good, there are always several sorts of good andmany kinds of duties, the variety of which is a dialectic of one against another and brings them into collision.At the same time because good is one, they ought to stand in harmony; and yet each of them, though it is a

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


particular duty, is as good and as duty absolute. It falls upon the agent to be the dialectic which, supersedingthis absolute claim of each, concludes such a combination of them as excludes the rest.

¤ 509 (b)To the agent, who in his existent sphere of liberty is essentially as a particular, his interest andwelfare must, on account of that existent sphere of liberty, be essentially an aim and therefore a duty. But atthe same time in aiming at the good, which is the not−particular but only universal of the will, the particularinterest ought not to be a constituent motive. On account of this independency of the two principles of action,it is likewise an accident whether they harmonize. And yet they ought to harmonize, because the agent, asindividual and universal, is always fundamentally one identity.

(c) But the agent is not only a mere particular in his existence; it is also a form of his existence to be anabstract self−certainty, an abstract reflection of freedom into himself. He is thus distinct from the reason inthe will, and capable of making the universal itself a particular and in that way a semblance. The good is thusreduced to the level of a mere 'may happen' for the agent, who can therefore decide on something opposite tothe good, can be wicked.

¤ 510 (d) The external objectivity, following the distinction which has arisen in the subjective will (¤ 503),constitutes a peculiar world of its own − another extreme which stands in no rapport with the internalwill−determination. It is thus a matter of chance whether it harmonizes with the subjective aims, whether thegood is realized, and the wicked, an aim essentially and actually null, nullified in it: it is no less matter ofchance whether the agent finds in it his well− being, and more precisely whether in the world the good agentis happy and the wicked unhappy. But at the same time the world ought to allow the good action, the essentialthing, to be carried out in it; it ought to grant the good agent the satisfaction of his particular interest, andrefuse it to the wicked; just as it ought also to make the wicked itself null and void.

¤ 511 The all−round contradiction, expressed by this repeated ought, with its absoluteness which yet at thesame time is not − contains the most abstract 'analysis' of the mind in itself, its deepest descent into itself. Theonly relation the self−contradictory principles have to one another is in the abstract certainty of self; and forthis infinitude of subjectivity the universal will, good, right, and duty, no more exist than not. Thesubjectivity alone is aware of itself as choosing and deciding. This pure self−certitude, rising to its pitch,appears in the two directly inter−changing forrns − of Conscience and Wickedness. The former is the will ofgoodness; but a goodness which to this pure subjectivity is the non−objective, non−universal, the unutterable;and over which the agent is conscious that he in his individuality has the decision. Wickedness is the sameawareness that the single self possesses the decision, so far as the single self does not merely remain in thisabstraction, but takes up the content of a subjective interest contrary to the good.

¤ 512 This supreme pitch of the 'phenomenon' of will − sublimating itself to this absolute vanity − to agoodness, which has no objectivity, but is only sure of itself, and a self−assurance which involves thenullification of the universal−collapses by its own force. Wickedness, as the most intimate reflection ofsubjectivity itself, in opposition to the objective and universal (which it treats as mere sham) is the same asthe good sentiment of abstract goodness, which reserves to the subjectivity the determination thereof: − theutterly abstract semblance, the bare perversion and annihilation of itself. The result, the truth of thissemblance, is, on its negative side, the absolute nullity of this volition which would fain hold its own againstthe good, and of the good, which would only be abstract.

On the affirmative side, in the notion, this semblance thus collapsing is the same simple universality of thewill, which is the good. The subjectivity, in this its identity with the good, is only the infinite form, whichactualizes and develops it. In this way the standpoint of bare reciprocity between two independent sides − thestandpoint of the ought, is abandoned, and we have passed into the field of ethical life.

1. Moralitat

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


2. Der Vorsatz

3. That.

4. Handlung.

5. Die Absicht und das Wohl.

6. Das Gute und das Bose

C. THE MORAL LIFE, OR SOCIAL ETHICS(1)

¤ 513 The moral life is the perfection of spirit objective − the truth of the subjective and objective spirit itself.The failure of the latter consists − partly in having its freedom immediately in reality, in something externaltherefore, in a thing − partly in the abstract universality of its goodness. The failure of spirit subjectivesimilarly consists in this, that it is, as against the universal, abstractly self−determinant in its inwardindividuality. When these two imperfections are suppressed, subjective freedom exists as the covertly andovertly universal rational will, which is sensible of itself and actively disposed in the consciousness of theindividual subject, whilst its practical operation and immediate universal actuality at the same time exist asmoral usage, manner and custom − where self−conscious liberty has become nature.

¤ 514 The consciously free substance, in which the absolute 'ought' is no less an 'is', has actuality as the spiritof a nation. The abstract disruption of this spirit singles it out into persons, whose independence it, however,controls and entirely dominates from within. But the person, as an intelligent being, feels that underlyingessence to be his own very being − ceases when so minded to be a mere accident of it − looks upon it as hisabsolute final aim. In its actuality he sees not less an achieved present, than somewhat he brings about by hisaction − yet somewhat which without all question is. Thus, without any selective reflection, the personperforms his duty as his own and as something which is; and in this necessity he has himself and his actualfreedom.

¤ 515 Because the substance is the absolute unity of individuality and universality of freedom, it follows thatthe actuality and action of each individual to keep and to take care of his own being, while it is on one handconditioned by the pre−supposed total in whose complex alone he exists, is on the other a transition into auniversal product. − The social disposition of the individuals is their sense of the substance, and of theidentity of all their interests with the total; and that the other individuals mutually know each other and areactual only in this identity, is confidence (trust) − the genuine ethical temper.

¤ 516 The relations between individuals in the several situations to which the substance is particularized formtheir ethical duties. The ethical personality, i.e. the subjectivity which is permeated by the substantial life, isvirtue. In relation to the bare facts of external being, to destiny, virtue does not treat them as a mere negation,and is thus a quiet repose in itself: in relation to substantial objectivity, to the total of ethical actuality, itexists as confidence, as deliberate work for the community, and the capacity of sacrificing self thereto; whilstin relation to the incidental relations of social circumstance, it is in the first instance justice and thenbenevolence. In the latter sphere, and in its attitude to its own visible being and corporeity, the individualityexpresses its special character, temperament, etc. as personal virtues.

¤ 517 The ethical substance is: (a) as 'immediate' or natural mind − the Family. (b) The 'relative' totality ofthe 'relative' relations of the individuals as independent persons to one another in a formal universality − CivilSociety. (c) The self−conscious substance, as the mind developed to an organic actuality − the PoliticalConstitution.

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C. THE MORAL LIFE, OR SOCIAL ETHICS(1) 48

(a) THE FAMILY

¤ 518 The ethical spirit, in its immediacy, contains the natural factor that the individual has its substantialexistence in its natural universal, i.e. in its kind. This is the sexual tie, elevated, however, to a spiritualsignificance, − the unanimity of love and the temper of trust. In the shape of the family, mind appears asfeeling.

¤ 519 (1) The physical difference of sex thus appears at the same time as a difference of intellectual andmoral type. With their exclusive individualities these personalities combine to form a single person: thesubjective union of hearts, becoming a 'substantial' unity, makes this union an ethical tie − Marriage. The'substantial' union of hearts makes marriage an indivisible personal bond − monogamic marriage: the bodilyconjunction is a sequel to the moral attachment. A further sequel is community of personal and privateinterests.

¤ 520 (2) By the community in which the various members constituting the family stand in reference toproperty, that property of the one person (representing the family) acquires an ethical interest, as do also itsindustry, labour, and care for the future.

¤ 521 The ethical principle which is conjoined with the natural generation of the children, and which wasassumed to have primary importance in first forming the marriage union, is actually realized in the second orspiritual birth of the children − in educating them to independent personality.

¤ 522 (3) The children, thus invested with independence, leave the concrete life and action of the family towhich they primarily belong, acquire an existence of their own, destined, however, to found anew such anactual family. Marriage is of course broken up by the natural element contained in it, the death of husbandand wife: but even their union of hearts, as it is a mere 'substantiality' of feeling, contains the germ of liabilityto chance and decay. In virtue of such fortuitousness, the members of the family take up to each other thestatus of persons; and it is thus that the family finds introduced into it for the first time the element, originallyforeign to it, of legal regulation.

(b) CIVIL SOCIETY(2)

¤ 523 As the substance, being an intelligent substance, particularizes itself abstractly into many persons (thefamily is only a single person), into families or individuals, who exist independent and free, as privatepersons, it loses its ethical character: for these persons as such have in their consciousness and as their aimnot the absolute unity, but their own petty selves and particular interests. Thus arises the system of atomistic:by which the substance is reduced to a general system of adjustments to connect self−subsisting extremes andtheir particular interests. The developed totality of this connective system is the state as civil society, or stateexternal.

(a) The System of Wants(3)

¤ 524 (a) The particularity of the persons includes in the first instance their wants. The possibility ofsatisfying these wants is here laid on the social fabric, the general stock from which all derive theirsatisfaction. In the condition of things in which this method of satisfaction by indirect adjustment is realized,immediate seizure (¤ 488) of external objects as means thereto exists barely or not at all: the objects arealready property. To acquire them is only possible by the intervention, on one hand, of the possessor's will,which as particular has in view the satisfaction of their variously defined interests; while, on the other hand, itis conditioned by the ever−continued production of fresh means of exchange by the exchangers' own labour.This instrument, by which the labour of all facilitates satisfaction of wants, constitutes the general stock.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


¤ 525 (b) The glimmer of universal principle in this particularity of wants is found in the way intellect createsdifferences in them, and thus causes an indefinite multiplication both of wants and of means for theirdifferent phases. Both are thus rendered more and more abstract. This 'morcellement' of their content byabstraction gives rise to the division of labour. The habit of this abstraction in enjoyment, information,learning, and demeanour constitutes training in this sphere, or nominal culture in general.

¤ 526 The labour which thus becomes more abstract tends on one hand by its uniformity to make laboureasier and to increase production − on another to limit each person to a single kind of technical skill, and thusproduce more unconditional dependence on the social system.. The skill itself becomes in this waymechanical, and gets the capability of letting the machine take the place of human labour.

¤ 527 (c) But the concrete division of the general stock − which is also a general business (of the wholesociety) − into particular masses determined by the factors of the notion − masses each of which possesses itsown basis of subsistence, and a corresponding mode of labour, of needs, and of means for satisfying them,also of aims and interests, as well as of mental culture and habit − constitutes the difference of Estates (ordersor ranks). Individuals apportion themselves to these according to natural talent, skill, option, and accident. Asbelonging to such a definite and stable sphere, they have their actual existence, which as existence isessentially a particular; and in it they have their social morality, which is honesty, their recognition and theirhonour.

Where civil society, and with it the State, exists, there arise the several estates in their difference: for theuniversal substance, as vital, exists only so far as it organically particularizes itself. The history ofconstitutions is the history of the growth of these estates, of the legal relationships of individuals to them, andof these estates to one another and to their centre.

¤ 528 To the 'substantial', natural estate the fruitful soil and ground supply a natural and stable capital; itsaction gets direction and content through natural features, and its moral life is founded on faith and trust. Thesecond, the 'reflected' estate has as its allotment the social capital, the medium created by the action ofmiddlemen, of mere agents, and an ensemble of contingencies, where the individual has to depend on hissubjective skill, talent, intelligence, and industry. The third, 'thinking' estate has for its business the generalinterests; like the second it has a subsistence procured by means of its own skill, and like the first a certainsubsistence, certain, however, because guaranteed through the whole society.

(b) Administration of Justice(4)

¤ 529 When matured through the operation of natural need and free option into a system of universalrelationships and a regular course of external necessity, the principle of casual particularity gets that stablearticulation which liberty requires in the shape of formal right. (1) The actualization which right gets in thissphere of mere practical intelligence is that it be brought to consciousness as the stable universal, that it beknown and stated in its specificality with the voice of authority − the Law.(5)

The positive element in laws concerns only their form of publicity and authority − which makes it possiblefor them to be known by all in a customary and external way. Their content per se may be reasonable − or itmay be unreasonable and so wrong. But when right, in the course of definite manifestation, is developed indetail, and its content analyses itself to gain definiteness, this analysis, because of the finitude of its materials,falls into the falsely infinite progress: the final definiteness, which is absolutely essential and causes a breakin this progress of unreality, can in this sphere of finitude be attained only in a way that savours ofcontingency and arbitrariness. Thus whether three years, ten thalers, or only 2 * , 2 3/4 , 2 4/5 years, and soon ad infinitum, be the right and just thing, can by no means be decided on intelligible principles − and yet itshould be decided. Hence, though of course only at the final points of deciding, on the side of externalexistence, the 'positive' principle naturally enters law as contingency and arbitrariness. This happens and has

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from of old happened in all legislations: the only thing wanted is clearly to be aware of it, and not be misledby the talk and the pretense as if the ideal of law were, or could be, to be, at every point, determined throughreason or legal intelligence, on purely reasonable and intelligent grounds. It is a futile perfectionism to havesuch expectations and to make such requirements in the sphere of the finite.

There are some who look upon laws as an evil and a profanity, and who regard governing and being governedfrom natural love, hereditary divinity or nobility, by faith and trust, as the genuine order of life, while thereign of law is held an order of corruption and injustice. These people forget that the stars − and the cattle too− are governed and well governed too by laws; − laws, however, which are only internally in these objects,not for them, not as laws set to them: − whereas it is man's privilege to know his law. They forget thereforethat he can truly obey only such known law − even as his law can only be a just law, as it is a known law; −though in other respects it must be in its essential content contingency and caprice, or at least be mixed andpolluted with such elements.

The same empty requirement of perfection is employed for an opposite thesis − viz. to support the opinionthat a code is impossible or impracticable. In this case there comes in the additional absurdity of puttingessential and universal provision in one class with the particular detail. The finite material is definable on andon to the false infinite: but this advance is not, as in the mental images of space, a generation of new spatialcharacteristics of the same quality as those preceding them, but an advance into greater and ever greaterspeciality by the acumen of the analytic intellect, which discovers new distinctions, which again make newdecisions necessary. To provisions of this sort one may give the name of new decisions or new laws; but inproportion to the gradual advance in specialization the interest and value of these provisions declines. Theyfall within the already subsisting 'substantial', general laws, like improvements on a floor or a door, within thehouse − which though something new, are not a new house. But there is a contrary case. If the legislation of arude age began with single provisos, which go on by their very nature always increasing their number, therearises, with the advance in multitude, the need of a simpler code − the need, i.e. of embracing that lot ofsingulars in their general features. To find and be able to express these principles well beseems an intelligentand civilized nation. Such a gathering up of single rules into general forms, first really deserving the name oflaws, has lately been begun in some directions by the English Minister Peel, who has by so doing gained thegratitude, even the admiration, of his countrymen.

¤ 530 (2) The positive form of Laws − to be promulgated and made known as laws − is a condition of theexternal obligation to obey them; inasmuch as, being laws of strict right, they touch only the abstract will −itself at bottom external − not the moral or ethical will. The subjectivity to which the will has in this directiona right is here only that the laws be known. This subjective existence, is as existence of the absolute truth inthis sphere of Right, at the same time an externally objective existence, as universal authority and necessity.

The legality of property and of private transactions concerned therewith − in consideration of the principlethat all law must be promulgated, recognized, and thus become authoritative − gets its universal guaranteethrough formalities.

¤ 531 (3) Legal forms get the necessity, to which objective existence determines itself, in the judicial system.Abstract right has to exhibit itself to the court − to the individualized right − as proven: − a process in whichthere may be a difference between what is abstractly right and what is provably right. The court takescognisance and action in the interest of right as such, deprives the existence of right of its contingency, and inparticular transforms this existence − as this exists as revenge − into punishment (¤ 500).

The comparison of the two species, or rather two elements in the judicial conviction, bearing on the actualstate of the case in relation to the accused − (1) according as that conviction is based on mere circumstancesand other people's witness alone − or (2) in addition requires the confession of the accused, constitutes themain point in the question of the so−called jury−courts. It is an essential point that the two ingredients of a

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judicial cognisance, the judgement as to the state of the fact, and the judgement as application of the law to it,should, as at bottom different sides, be exercised as different functions. By the said institution they areallotted even to bodies differently qualified −f rom the one of which individuals belonging to the officialjudiciary are expressly excluded. To carry this separation of functions up to this separation in the courts restsrather on extra−essential considerations: the main point remains only the separate performance of theseessentially different functions. − It is a more important point whether the confession of the accused is or isnot to be made a condition of penal judgement. The institution of the jury−court loses sight of this condition.The point is that on this ground certainty is completely inseparable from truth: but the confession is to beregarded as the very acme of certainty−giving which in its nature is subjective. The final decision thereforelies with the confession. To this therefore the accused has an absolute right, if the proof is to be made finaland the judges to be convinced. No doubt this factor is incomplete, because it is only one factor; but stillmore incomplete is the other when no less abstractly taken − viz. mere circumstantial evidence. The jurorsare essentially judges and pronounce a judgement. In so far, then, as all they have to go on are such objectiveproofs, whilst at the same time their defect of certainty (incomplete in so far as it is only in them) is admitted,the jury−court shows traces of its barbaric origin in a confusion and admixture between objective proofs andsubjective or so−called 'moral' conviction. − It is easy to call extraordinary punishments an absurdity; but thefault lies rather with the shallowness which takes offence at a mere name. Materially the principle involvesthe difference of objective probation according as it goes with or without the factor of absolute certificationwhich lies in confession.

¤ 532 The function of judicial administration is only to actualize to necessity the abstract side of personalliberty in civil society. But this actualization rests at first on the particular subjectivity of the judge, since hereas yet there is not found the necessary unity of it with right in the abstract. Conversely, the blind necessity ofthe system of wants is not lifted up into the consciousness of the universal, and worked from that point ofview.

(c) Police and Corporation(6)

¤ 533 Judicial administration naturally has no concern with such part of actions and interests as belongs onlyto particularity, and leaves to chance not only the occurrence of crimes but also the care for public weal. Incivil society the sole end is to satisfy want − and that, because it is man's want, in a uniform general way, soas to secure this satisfaction. But the machinery of social necessity leaves in many ways a casualness aboutthis satisfaction. This is due to the variability of the wants themselves, in which opinion and subjectivegood−pleasure play a great part. It results also from circumstances of locality, from the connections betweennation and nation, from errors and deceptions which can be foisted upon single members of the socialcirculation and are capable of creating disorder in it − as also and especially from the unequal capacity ofindividuals to take advantage of that general stock. The onward march of this necessity also sacrifices thevery particularities by which it is brought about, and does not itself contain the affirmative aim of securingthe satisfaction of individuals. So far as concerns them, it may be far from beneficial: yet here the individualsare the morally justifiable end.

¤ 534 To keep in view this general end, to ascertain the way in which the powers composing that socialnecessity act, and their variable ingredients, and to maintain that end in them and against them, is the work ofan institution which assumes on one hand, to the concrete of civil society, the position of an externaluniversality. Such an order acts with the power of an external state, which, in so far as it is rooted in thehigher or substantial state, appears as state− 'police'. On the other hand, in this sphere of particularity the onlyrecognition of the aim of substantial universality and the only carrying of it out is restricted to the business ofparticular branches and interests. Thus we have the corporation, in which the particular citizen in his privatecapacity finds the securing of his stock, whilst at the same time he in it emerges from his single privateinterest, and has a conscious activity for a comparatively universal end, just as in his legal and professionalduties he has his social morality.

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(c) THE STATE.

¤ 535 The State is the self−conscious ethical substance, the unification of the family principle with that ofcivil society. The same unity, which is in the family as a feeling of love, is its essence, receiving, however, atthe same time through the second principle of conscious and spontaneously active volition the form ofconscious universality. This universal principle, with all its evolution in detail, is the absolute aim andcontent of the knowing subject, which thus identifies itself in its volition with the system of reasonableness.

¤ 536 The state is (a) its inward structure as a self−relating development − constitutional (inner−state) law:(b) a particular individual, and therefore in connection with other particular individuals − international(outer−state) law; (c) but these particular minds are only stages in the general development of mind in itsactuality: universal history.

(a) Constitutional Law(7)

¤ 537 The essence of the state is the universal, self−originated, and self−developed − the reasonable spirit ofwill; but, as self−knowing and self−actualizing, sheer subjectivity, and − as an actuality − one individual. Itswork generally − in relation to the extreme of individuality as the multitude of individuals − consists in adouble function. First it maintains them as persons, thus making right a necessary actuality, then it promotestheir welfare, which each originally takes care of for himself, but which has a thoroughly general side; itprotects the family and guides civil society. Secondly, it carries back both, and the whole disposition andaction of the individual − whose tendency is to become a centre of his own − into the life of the universalsubstance; and, in this direction, as a free power it interferes with those subordinate spheres and maintainsthem in substantial immanence.

¤ 538 The laws express the special provisions for objective freedom. First, to the immediate agent, hisindependent self−will and particular interest, they are restrictions. But, secondly, they are an absolute finalend and the universal work: hence they are a product of the 'functions' of the various orders which parcelthemselves more and more out of the general particularizing, and are a fruit of all the acts and privateconcerns of individuals. Thirdly, they are the substance of the volition of individuals − which volition isthereby free − and of their disposition: being as such exhibited as current usage.

¤ 539 As a living mind, the state only is as an organized whole, differentiated into particular agencies, which,proceeding from the one notion (though not known as notion) of the reasonable will, continually produce it astheir result. The constitution is this articulation or organization of state−power. It provides for the reasonablewill − in so far as it is in the individuals only implicitly the universal will − coming to a consciousness and anunderstanding of itself and being found; also for that will being put in actuality, through the action of thegovernment and its several branches, and not left to perish, but protected both against their casual subjectivityand against that of the individuals. The constitution is existent justice − the actuality of liberty in thedevelopment of all its reasonable provisions.

Liberty and Equality are the simple rubrics into which is frequently concentrated what should form thefundamental principle, the final aim and result of the constitution. However true this is, the defect of theseterms is their utter abstractness: if stuck to in this abstract form, they are principles which either prevent therise of the concreteness of the state, i.e. its articulation into a constitution and a government in general, ordestroy them. With the state there arises inequality, the difference of governing powers and of governed,magistracies, authorities, directories, etc. The principle of equality, logically carried out, rejects alldifferences, and thus allows no sort of political condition to exist. Liberty and equality are indeed thefoundation of the state, but as the most abstract also the most superficial, and for that very reason naturallythe most familiar. It is important therefore to study them closer.

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As regards, first, Equality, the familiar proposition, All men are by nature equal, blunders by confusing the'natural' with the 'notion'. It ought rather to read: By nature men are only unequal. But the notion of liberty, asit exists as such, without further specification and development, is abstract subjectivity, as a person capable ofproperty (¤ 488). This single abstract feature of personality constitutes the actual equality of human beings.But that this freedom should exist, that it should be man (and not as in Greece, Rome, etc. some men) that isrecognized and legally regarded as a person, is so little by nature, that it is rather only a result and product ofthe consciousness of the deepest principle of mind, and of the universality and expansion of thisconsciousness. That the citizens are equal before the law contains a great truth, but which so expressed is atautology: it only states that the legal status in general exists, that the laws rule. But, as regards the concrete,the citizens − besides their personality − are equal before the law only in these points when they areotherwise equal outside the law. Only that equality which (in whatever way it be) they, as it happens,otherwise have in property, age, physical strength, talent, skill, etc. − or even in crime, can and ought to makethem deserve equal treatment before the law: − only it can make them − as regards taxation, military service,eligibility to office, etc.− punishment, etc. − equal in the concrete. The laws themselves, except in so far asthey concern that narrow circle of personality, presuppose unequal conditions, and provide for the unequallegal duties and appurtenances resulting therefrom.

As regards Liberty, it is originally taken partly in a negative sense against arbitrary intolerance and lawlesstreatment, partly in the affirmative sense of subjective freedom; but this freedom is allowed great latitudeboth as regards the agent's self−will and action for his particular ends, and as regards his claim to have apersonal intelligence and a personal share in general affairs. Formerly the legally defined rights, private aswell as public rights of a nation, town, etc. were called its 'liberties'. Really, every genuine law is a liberty: itcontains a reasonable principle of objective mind; in other words, it embodies a liberty. Nothing has become,on the contrary, more familiar than the idea that each must restrict his liberty in relation to the liberty ofothers: that the state is a condition of such reciprocal restriction, and that the laws are restrictions. To suchhabits of mind liberty is viewed as only casual good − pleasure and self−will. Hence it has also been said that'modern' nations are only susceptible of equality, or of equality more than liberty: and that for no other reasonthan that, with an assumed definition of liberty (chiefly the participation of all in political affairs and actions),it was impossible to make ends meet in actuality − which is at once more reasonable and more powerful thanabstract presuppositions. On the contrary, it should be said that it is just the great development and maturityof form in modern states which produces the supreme concrete inequality of individuals in actuality: while,through the deeper reasonableness of laws and the greater stability of the legal state, it gives rise to greaterand more stable liberty, which it can without incompatibility allow. Even the superficial distinction of thewords liberty and equality points to the fact that the former tends to inequality: whereas, on the contrary, thecurrent notions of liberty only carry us back to equality. But the more we fortify liberty, − as security ofproperty, as possibility for each to develop and make the best of his talents and good qualities, the more itgets taken for granted: and then the sense and appreciation of liberty especially turns in a subjective direction.By this is meant the liberty to attempt action on every side, and to throw oneself at pleasure in action forparticular and for general intellectual interests, the removal of all checks on the individual particularity, aswell as the inward liberty in which the subject has principles, has an insight and conviction of his own, andthus gains moral independence. But this liberty itself on one hand implies that supreme differentiation inwhich men are unequal and make themselves more unequal by education; and on another it only grows upunder conditions of that objective liberty, and is and could grow to such height only in modern states. If, withthis development of particularity, there be simultaneous and endless increase of the number of wants, and ofthe difficulty of satisfying them, of the lust of argument and the fancy of detecting faults, with its insatiatevanity, it is all but part of that indiscriminating relaxation of individuality in this sphere which generates allpossible complications, and must deal with them as it can. Such a sphere is of course also the field ofrestrictions, because liberty is there under the taint of natural self−will and self−pleasing, and has therefore torestrict itself: and that, not merely with regard to the naturalness, self−will and self−conceit, of others, butespecially and essentially with regard to reasonable liberty.

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The term political liberty, however, is often used to mean formal participation in the public affairs of state bythe will and action even of those individuals who otherwise find their chief function in the particular aims andbusiness of civil society. And it has in part become usual to give the title constitution only to the side of thestate which concerns such participation of these individuals in general affairs, and to regard a state, in whichthis is not formally done, as a state without a constitution. On this use of the term the only thing to remark isthat by constitution must be understood the determination of rights, i.e. of liberties in general, and theorganization of the actualization of them; and that political freedom in the above sense can in any case onlyconstitute a part of it. Of it the following paragraphs will speak.

¤ 540 The guarantee of a constitution (i.e. the necessity that the laws be reasonable, and their actualizationsecured) lies in the collective spirit of the nation − especially in the specific way in which it is itself consciousof its reason. (Religion is that consciousness in its absolute substantiality.) But the guarantee lies also, at thesame time in the actual organization or development of that principle in suitable institutions. The constitutionpresupposes that consciousness of the collective spirit, and conversely that spirit presupposes the constitution:for the actual spirit only has a definite consciousness of its principles, in so far as it has them actually existentbefore it.

The question − To whom (to what authority and how organized) belongs the power to make a constitution? isthe same as the question, Who has to make the spirit of a nation? Separate our idea of a constitution from thatof the collective spirit, as if the latter exists or has existed without a constitution, and your fancy only proveshow superficially you have apprehended the nexus between the spirit in its self−consciousness and in itsactuality. What is thus called 'making' a 'constitution', is − just because of this inseparability − a thing that hasnever happened in history, just as little as the making of a code of laws. A constitution only develops fromthe national spirit identically with that spirit's own development, and runs through at the same time with it thegrades of formation and the alterations required by its concept. It is the indwelling spirit and the history of thenation (and, be it added, the history is only that spirit's history) by which constitutions have been and aremade.

¤ 541 The really living totality − that which preserves, in other words continually produces the state ingeneral and its constitution, is the government. The organization which natural necessity gives is seen in therise of the family and of the 'estates' of civil society. The government is the universal part of the constitution,i.e. the part which intentionally aims at preserving those parts, but at the same time gets hold of and carriesout those general aims of the whole which rise above the function, of the family and of civil society. Theorganization of the government is likewise its differentiation into powers, as their peculiarities have a basis inprinciple; yet without that difference losing touch with the actual unity they have in the notion's subjectivity.

As the most obvious categories of the notion are those of universality and individuality, and their relationshipthat of subsumption of individual under universal, it has come about that in the state the legislative andexecutive power have been so distinguished as to make the former exist apart as the absolute superior, and tosubdivide the latter again into administrative (government) power and judicial power, according as the lawsare applied to public or private affairs. The division of these powers has been treated as the condition ofpolitical equilibrium, meaning by division their independence one of another in existence − subject always,however, to the abovementioned subsumption of the powers of the individual under the power of the general.The theory of such 'division' unmistakably implies the elements of the notion, but so combined by'understanding' as to result in an absurd collocation, instead of the self−redintegration of the living spirit. Theone essential canon to make liberty deep and real is to give every business belonging to the general interestsof the state a separate organization wherever they are essentially distinct. Such real division must be: forliberty is only deep when it is differentiated in all its fullness and these differences manifested in existence.But to make the business of legislation an independent power − to make it the first power, with the furtherproviso that all citizens shall have part therein, and the government be merely executive and dependent,presupposes ignorance that the true idea, and therefore the living and spiritual actuality, is the

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self−redintegrating notion, in other words, the subjectivity which contains in it universality as only one of itsmoments. (A mistake still greater, if it goes with the fancy that the constitution and the fundamental lawswere still one day to make − in a state of society, which includes an already existing development ofdifferences.) Individuality is the first and supreme principle which makes itself felt through the state'sorganization. Only through the government, and by its embracing in itself the particular businesses (includingthe abstract legislative business, which taken apart is also particular), is the state one. These, as always, arethe terms on which the different elements essentially and alone truly stand towards each other in the logic of'reason', as opposed to the external footing they stand on in 'understanding', which never gets beyondsubsuming the individual and particular under the universal. What disorganizes the unity of logical reason,equally disorganizes actuality.

¤ 542 In the government − regarded as organic totality − the sovereign power (principate) is (a) subjectivityas the infinite self−unity of the notion in its development; − the all−sustaining, all−decreeing will of the state,its highest peak and all−pervasive unity. In the perfect form of the state, in which each and every element ofthe notion has reached free existence, this subjectivity is not a so−called 'moral person', or a decree issuingfrom a majority (forms in which the unity of the decreeing will has not an actual existence), but an actualindividual − the will of a decreeing individual, − monarchy. The monarchical constitution is therefore theconstitution of developed reason: all other constitutions belong to lower grades of the development andrealization of reason.

The unification of all concrete state−powers into one existence, as in the patriarchal society − or, as in ademocratic constitution, the participation of all in all affairs − impugns the principle of the division ofpowers, i.e. the developed liberty of the constituent factors of the Idea. But no whit less must the division (theworking out of these factors each to a free totality) be reduced to 'ideal' unity, i.e. to subjectivity. The maturedifferentiation or realization of the Idea means, essentially, that this subjectivity should grow to be a real'moment', an actual existence; and this actuality is not otherwise than as the individuality of the monarch −the subjectivity of abstract and final decision existent in one person. All those forms of collective decreeingand willing − a common will which shall be the sum and the resultant (on aristocratic or democraticprinciples) of the atomistic of single wills, have on them the mark of the unreality of an abstraction. Twopoints only are all−important, first to see the necessity of each of the notional factors, and secondly the formin which it is actualized. It is only the nature of the speculative notion which can really give light on thematter. That subjectivity − being the 'moment' which emphasizes the need of abstract deciding in general −partly leads on to the proviso that the name of the monarch appear as the bond and sanction under whicheverything is done in the government; − partly, being simple self−relation, has attached to it the characteristicof immediacy, and then of nature − whereby the destination of individuals for the dignity of the princelypower is fixed by inheritance.

¤ 543 (b) In the particular government−power there emerges, first, the division of state−business into itsbranches (otherwise defined), legislative power, administration of justice or judicial power, administrationand police, and its consequent distribution between particular boards or offices, which having their businessappointed by law, to that end and for that reason, possess independence of action, without at the same timeceasing to stand under higher supervision. Secondly, too, there arises the participation of several instate−business, who together constitute the 'general order' (¤ 528) in so far as they take on themselves thecharge of universal ends as the essential function of their particular life; − the further condition for being ableto take individually part in this business being a certain training, aptitude, and skill for such ends.

¤ 544 The estates−collegium or provincial council is an institution by which all such as belong to civil societyin general, and are to that degree private persons, participate in the governmental power, especially inlegislation − viz. such legislation as concerns the universal scope of those interests which do not, like peaceand war, involve the, as it were, personal interference and action of the State as one man, and therefore do notbelong specially to the province of the sovereign power. By virtue of this participation subjective liberty and

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conceit, with their general opinion, can show themselves palpably efficacious and enjoy the satisfaction offeeling themselves to count for something.

The division of constitutions into democracy, aristocracy and monarchy, is still the most definite statement oftheir difference in relation to sovereignty. They must at the same time be regarded as necessary structures inthe path of development − in short, in the history of the State. Hence it is superficial and absurd to representthem as an object of choice. The pure forms − necessary to the process of evolution − are, in so far as they arefinite and in course of change, conjoined both with forms of their degeneration − such as ochlocracy, etc., andwith earlier transition−forms. These two forms are not to be confused with those legitimate structures. Thus,it may be − if we look only to the fact that the will of one individual stands at the head of the state − orientaldespotism is included under the vague name monarchy − as also feudal monarchy, to which indeed even thefavourite name of 'constitutional monarchy' cannot be refused. The true difference of these forms fromgenuine monarchy depends on the true value of those principles of right which are in vogue and have theiractuality and guarantee in the state−power. These principles are those expounded earlier, liberty of property,and above all personal liberty, civil society, with its industry and its communities, and the regulatedefficiency of the particular bureaux in subordination to the laws.

The question which is most discussed is in what sense we are to understand the participation of privatepersons in state affairs. For it is as private persons that the members of bodies of estates are primarily to betaken, be they treated as mere individuals, or as representatives of a number of people or of the nation. Theaggregate of private persons is often spoken of as the nation: but as such an aggregate it is vulgus, notpopulus: and in this direction it is the one sole aim of the state that a nation should not come to existence, topower and action, as such an aggregate. Such a condition of a nation is a condition of lawlessness,demoralization, brutishness: in it the nation would only be a shapeless, wild, blind force, like that of thestormy, elemental sea, which, however, is not self−destructive, as the nation − a spiritual element − would be.Yet such a condition may be often heard described as that of true freedom. If there is to be any sense inembarking upon the question of the participation of private persons in public affairs, it is not a brutish mass,but an already organized nation − one in which a governmental power exists − which should be presupposed.The desirability of such participation, however, is not to be put in the superiority of particular intelligence,which private persons are supposed to have over state officials − the contrary must be the case − nor in thesuperiority of their goodwill for the general best. The members of civil society as such are rather people whofind their nearest duty in their private interest and (as especially in the feudal society) in the interest of theirprivileged corporation. Take the case of England which, because private persons have a predominant share inpublic affairs, has been regarded as having the freest of all constitutions. Experience shows that that country− as compared with the other civilized states of Europe − is the most backward in civil and criminallegislation, in the law and liberty of property, in arrangements for art and science, and that objective freedomor rational right is rather sacrificed to formal right and particular private interest; and that this happens evenin the institutions and possessions suppo'sed to be dedicated to religion. The desirability of private personstaking part in public affairs is partly to be put in their concrete, and therefore more urgent, sense of generalwants. But the true motive is the right of the collective spirit to appear as an externally universal will, actingwith orderly and express efficacy for the public concerns. By this satisfaction of this right it gets its own lifequickened, and at the same time breathes fresh life in the administrative officials; who thus have it broughthome to them that not merely have they to enforce duties but also to have regard to rights. Private citizens arein the state the incomparably greater number, and form the multitude of such as are recognized as persons.Hence the will−reason exhibits its existence in them as a preponderating majority of freemen, or in its'reflectional' universality, which has its actuality vouchsafed it as a participation in the sovereignty. But it hasalready been noted as a 'moment' of civil society (¤¤ 527, 534) that the individuals rise from external intosubstantial universality, and form a particular kind − the Estates: and it is not in the inorganic form of mereindividuals as such (after the democratic fashion of election), but as organic factors, as estates, that they enterupon that participation. In the state a power or agency must never appear and act as a formless, inorganicshape, i.e. basing itself on the principle of multeity and mere numbers.

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Assemblies of Estates have been wrongly designated as the legislative power, so far as they form only onebranch of that power − a branch in which the special government−officials have an ex officio share, while thesovereign power has the privilege of final decision. In a civilized state, moreover, legislation can only be afurther modification of existing laws, and so−called new laws can only deal with minutiae of detail andparticularities (cf. ¤ 529 note), the main drift of which has been already prepared or preliminarily settled bythe practice of the law−courts. The so−called financial law, in so far as it requires the assent of the estates, isreally a government affair: it is only improperly called a law, in the general sense of embracing a wide,indeed the whole, range of the external means of government. The finances deal with what in their nature areonly particular needs, ever newly recurring, even if they touch on the sum total of such needs. If the main partof the requirement were − as it very likely is − regarded as permanent, the provision for it would have morethe nature of a law: but to be a law it would have to be made once for all, and not to be made yearly, or everyfew years, afresh. The part which varies according to time and circumstances concerns in reality the smallestpart of the amount, and the provisions with regard to it have even less the character of a law: and yet it is andmay be only this slight variable part which is matter of dispute, and can be subjected to a varying yearlyestimate. It is this last then which falsely bears the high−sounding names of the 'Grant' of the Budget, i.e. ofthe whole of the finances. A law for one year and made each year has even to the plain man somethingpalpably absurd: for he distinguishes the essential and developed universal, as content of a true law, from thereflectional universality which only externally embraces what in its nature is many. To give the name of a lawto the annual fixing of financial requirements only serves − with the presupposed separation of legislativefrom executive − to keep up the illusion of that separation having real existence, and to conceal the fact thatthe legislative power, when it makes a decree about finance, is really engaged with strict executive business.But the importance attached to the power of from time to time granting 'supply', on the ground that theassembly of estates possesses in it a check on the government, and thus a guarantee against injustice andviolence − this importance is in one way rather plausible than real. The financial measures necessary for thestate's subsistence cannot be made conditional on any other circumstances, nor can the state's subsistence beput yearly in doubt. It would be a parallel absurdity if the government were, e.g., to grant and arrange thejudicial institutions always for a limited time merely; and thus, by the threat of suspending the activity ofsuch an institution and the fear of a consequent state of brigandage, reserve for itself a means of coercingprivate individuals. Then again, the pictures of a condition of affairs, in which it might be useful andnecessary to have in hand means of compulsion, are partly based on the false conception of a contractbetween rulers and ruled, and partly presuppose the possibility of such a divergence in spirit between thesetwo parties as would make constitution and government quite out of the question. If we suppose the emptypossibility of getting help by such compulsive means brought into existence, such help would rather be thederangement and dissolution of the state, in which there would no longer be a government, but only parties,and the violence and oppression of one party would only be helped away by the other. To fit together theseveral parts of the state into a constitution after the fashion of mere understanding − i.e. to adjust within itthe machinery of a balance of powers external to each other − is to contravene the fundamental idea of what astate is.

¤ 545 The final aspect of the state is to appear in immediate actuality as a single nation marked by physicalconditions. As a single individual it is exclusive against other like individuals. In their mutual relations,waywardness and chance have a place; for each person in the aggregate is autonomous: the universal of lawis only postulated between them, and not actually existent. This independence of a central authority reducesdisputes between them to terms of mutual violence, a state of war, to meet which the general estate in thecommunity assumes the particular function of maintaining the state's independence against other states, andbecomes the estate of bravery.

¤ 546 This state of war shows the omnipotence of the state in its individuality − an individuality that goeseven to abstract negativity. Country and fatherland then appear as the power by which the particularindependence of individuals and their absorption in the external existence of possession and in natural life isconvicted of its own nullity − as the power which procures the maintenance of the general substance by the

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patriotic sacrifice on the part of these individuals of this natural and particular existence − so makingnugatory the nugatoriness that confronts it.

(b) External Public Law(8)

¤ 547 In the state of war the independence of States is at stake. In one case the result may be the mutualrecognition of free national individualities (¤ 430): and by peace−conventions supposed to be for ever, boththis general recognition, and the special claims of nations on one another, are settled and fixed. Externalstate−rights rest partly on these positive treaties, but to that extent contain only rights failing short of trueactuality (¤ 545): partly so−called international law, the general principle of which is its presupposedrecognition by the several States. It thus restricts their otherwise unchecked action against one another in sucha way that the possibility of peace is left; and distinguishes individuals as private persons (non−belligerents)from the state. In general, international law rests on social usage.

(c) Universal History(9)

¤ 548 As the mind of a special nation is actual and its liberty is under natural conditions, it admits on thisnature−side the influence of geographical and climatic qualities. It is in time; and as regards its range andscope, has essentially a particular principle on the lines of which it must run through a development of itsconsciousness and its actuality. It has, in short, a history of its own. But as a restricted mind its independenceis something secondary; it passes into universal world−history, the events of which exhibit the dialectic of theseveral national minds − the judgement of the world.

¤ 549 This movement is the path of liberation for the spiritual substance, the deed by which the absolute finalaim of the world is realized in it, and the merely implicit mind achieves consciousness andself−consciousness. It is thus the revelation and actuality of its essential and completed essence, whereby itbecomes to the outward eye a universal spirit − a world−mind. As this development is in time and in realexistence, as it is a history, its several stages and steps are the national minds, each of which, as single andendued by nature with a specific character, is appointed to occupy only one grade, and accomplish one task inthe whole deed.

The presupposition that history has an essential and actual end, from the principles of which certaincharacteristic results logically flow, is called an a priori view of it, and philosophy is reproached with a priorihistory−writing. On this point, and on history−writing in general, this note must go into further detail. Thathistory, and above all universal history, is founded on an essential and actual aim, which actually is and willbe realized in it − the plan of Providence; that, in short, there is Reason in history, must be decided on strictlyphilosophical ground, and thus shown to be essentially and in fact necessary. To presuppose such aim isblameworthy only when the assumed conceptions or thoughts are arbitrarily adopted, and when a determinedattempt is made to force events and actions into conformity with such conceptions. For such a priori methodsof treatment at the present day, however, those are chiefly to blame who profess to be purely historical, andwho at the same time take opportunity expressly to raise their voice against the habit of philosophizing, firstin general, and then in history. Philosophy is to them a troublesome neighbour: for it is an enemy of allarbitrariness and hasty suggestions. Such a priori history−writing has sometimes burst out in quarters whereone would least have expected. it, especially on the philological side, and in Germany more than in Franceand England, where the art of historical writing has gone through a process of purification to a firmer andmaturer character. Fictions, like that of a primitive age and its primitive people, possessed from the first ofthe true knowledge of God and all the sciences − of sacerdotal races − and, when we come to minutiae, of aRoman epic, supposed to be the source of the legends which pass current for the history of ancient Rome,etc., have taken the place of the pragmatizing which detected psychological motives and associations. Thereis a wide circle of persons who seem to consider it incumbent on a learned and ingenious historian drawingfrom the original sources to concoct such baseless fancies, and form bold combinations of them from a

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learned rubbish−heap of out−of−the−way and trivial facts, in defiance of the best−accredited history.

Setting aside this subjective treatment of history, we find what is properly the opposite view forbidding us toimport into history an objective purpose. This is after all synonymous with what seems to be the still morelegitimate demand that the historian should proceed with impartiality. This is a requirement often andespecially made on the history of philosophy: where it is insisted there should be no prepossession in favourof an idea or opinion, just as a judge should have no special sympathy for one of the contending parties. Inthe case of the judge it is at the same time assumed that he would administer his office ill and foolishly, if hehad not an interest, and an exclusive interest in justice, if he had not that for his aim and one sole aim, or if hedeclined to judge at all. This requirement which we may make upon the judge may be called partiality forjustice; and there is no difficulty here in distinguishing it from subjective partiality. But in speaking of theimpartiality required from the historian, this self−satisfied insipid chatter lets the distinction disappear, andrejects both kinds of interest. It demands that the historian shall bring with him no definite aim and view bywhich he may sort out, state, and criticize events, but shall narrate them exactly in the casual mode he findsthem, in their incoherent and unintelligent particularity. Now it is at least admitted that a history must have anobject, e.g. Rome and its fortunes, or the Decline of the grandeur of the Roman empire. But little reflection isneeded to discover that this is the presupposed end which lies at the basis of the events themselves, as of thecritical examination into their comparative importance, i.e. their nearer or more remote relation to it. Ahistory without such aim and such criticism would be only an imbecile mental divagation, not as good as afairy tale, for even children expect a motif in their stories, a purpose at least dimly surmisable with whichevents and actions are put in relation.

In the existence of a nation the substantial aim is to be a state and preserve itself as such. A nation with nostate formation (a mere nation), has, strictly speaking, no history − like the nations which existed before therise of states and others which still exist in a condition of savagery. What happens to a nation, and takes placewithin it, has its essential significance in relation to the state: whereas the mere particularities of individualsare at the greatest distance from the true object of history. It is true that the general spirit of an age leaves itsimprint in the character of its celebrated individuals, and even their particularities are but the very distant andthe dim media through which the collective light still plays in fainter colours. Ay, even such singularities as apetty occurrence, a word, express not a subjective particularity, but an age, a nation, a civilization, in strikingportraiture and brevity; and to select such trifles shows the hand of a historian of genius. But, on the otherhand, the main mass of singularities is a futile and useless mass, by the painstaking accumulation of whichthe objects of real historical value are overwhelmed and obscured. The essential characteristic of the spiritand its age is always contained in the great events. It was a correct instinct which sought to banish suchportraiture of the particular and the gleaning of insignificant traits, into the Novel (as in the celebratedromances of Walter Scott, etc.). Where the picture presents an unessential aspect of life it is certainly in goodtaste to conjoin it with an unessential material, such as the romance tales from private events and subjectivepassions. But to take the individual pettinesses of an age and of the persons in it, and, in the interest ofso−called truth, weave them into the picture of general interests, is not only against taste and judgement, butviolates the principles of objective truth. The only truth for mind is the substantial and underlying essence,and not the trivialities of external existence and contingency. It is therefore completely indifferent whethersuch insignificances are duly vouched for by documents, or, as in the romance, invented to suit the characterand ascribed to this or that name and circumstances.

The point of interest of Biography − to say a word on that here − appears to run directly counter to anyuniversal scope and aim. But biography too has for its background the historical world, with which theindividual is intimately bound up: even purely personal originality, the freak of humour, etc. suggests byallusion that central reality and has its interest heightened by the suggestion. The mere play of sentiment, onthe contary, has another ground and interest than history.

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The requirement of impartiality addressed to the history of philosophy (and also, we may add, to the historyof religion, first in general, and secondly, to church history) generally implies an even more decided baragainst presupposition of any objective aim. As the State was already called the point to which in politicalhistory criticism had to refer all events, so here the 'Truth' must be the object to which the several deeds andevents of the spirit would have to be referred. What is actually done is rather to make the contrarypresupposition. Histories with such an object as religion or philosophy are understood to have only subjectiveaims for their theme, i.e. only opinions and mere ideas, not an essential and realized object like the truth. Andthat with the mere excuse that there is no truth. On this assumption the sympathy with truth appears as only apartiality of the usual sort, a partiality for opinion and mere ideas, which all alike have no stuff in them. andare all treated as indifferent. In that way historical truth means but correctness − an accurate report ofexternals, without critical treatment save as regards this correctness − admitting, in this case, only qualitativeand quantitative judgements, no judgements of necessity or notion (cf. notes to ¤¤ 172 and 175). But, really,if Rome or the German empire, etc. are an actual and genuine object of political history, and the aim to whichthe phenomena are to be related and by which they are to be judged; then in universal history the genuinespirit, the consciousness of it, and of its essence, is even in a higher degree a true and actual object and theme,and an aim to which all other phenomena are essentially and actually subservient. Only therefore throughtheir relationship to it, i.e. through the judgement in which they are subsumed under it, while it inheres inthem, have they their value and even their existence. It is the spirit which not merely broods over history asover the waters but lives in it and is alone its principle of movement: and in the path of that spirit, liberty, i.e.a development determined by the notion of spirit, is the guiding principle and only its notion its final aim, i.e.truth. For Spirit is consciousness. Such a doctrine − or in other words that Reason is in history − will bepartly at least a plausible faith, partly it is a cognition of philosophy.

¤ 550 This liberation of mind, in which it proceeds to come to itself and to realize its truth, and the businessof so doing, is the supreme right, the absolute Law. The self−consciousness of a particular nation is a vehiclefor the contemporary development of the collective spirit in its actual existence: it is the objective actuality inwhich that spirit for the time invests its will. Against this absolute will the other particular natural minds haveno rights: that nation dominates the world: but yet the universal will steps onward over its property for thetime being, as over a special grade, and then delivers it over to its chance and doom.

¤ 551 To such extent as this business of actuality appears as an action, and therefore as a work of individuals,these individuals, as regards the substantial issue of their labour, are instruments, and their subjectivity,which is what is peculiar to them, is the empty form of activity. What they personally have gained thereforethrough the individual share they took in the substantial business (prepared and appointed independently ofthem) is a formal universality or subjective mental idea − Fame, which is their reward.

¤ 552 The national spirit contains nature−necessity, and stands in external existence (¤ 483): the ethicalsubstance, potentially infinite, is actually a particular and limited substance (¤¤ 549, 550); on its subjectiveside it labours under contingency, in the shape of its unreflective natural usages, and its content is presentedto it as something existing in time and tied to an external nature and external world. The spirit, however(which thinks in this moral organism) overrides and absorbs within itself the finitude attaching to it asnational spirit in its state and the state's temporal interests, in the system of laws and usages. It rises toapprehend itself in its essentiality. Such apprehension, however, still has the immanent limitedness of thenational spirit. But the spirit which thinks in universal history, stripping off at the same time those limitationsof the several national minds and its own temporal restrictions, lays hold of its concrete universality, and risesto apprehend the absolute mind, as the eternally actual truth in which the contemplative reason enjoysfreedom, while the necessity of nature and the necessity of history are only ministrant to its revelation and thevessels of its honour.

The strictly technical aspects of the Mind's elevation to God have been spoken of in the Introduction to theLogic (cf. especially ¤ 51, note). As regards the starting−point of that elevation, Kant has on the whole

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adopted the most correct, when he treats belief in God as proceeding from the practical Reason. For thatstarting− point contains the material or content which constitutes the content of the notion of God. But thetrue concrete material is neither Being (as in the cosmological) nor mere action by design (as in thephysico−theological proof) but the Mind, the absolute characteristic and function of which is effective reason,i.e. the self−determining and self−realizing notion itself − Liberty. That the elevation of subjective mind toGod which these considerations give is by Kant again deposed to a postulate − a mere 'ought' − is the peculiarperversity, formerly noticed, of calmly and simply reinstating as true and valid that very antithesis of finitude,the supersession of which into truth is the essence of that elevation.

As regards the 'mediation' which, as it has been already shown (¤ 192, cf. ¤ 204 note), that elevation to Godreally involves, the point specially calling for note is the ' moment' of negation through which the essentialcontent of the starting−point is purged of its finitude so as to come forth free. This factor, abstract in theformal treatment of logic, now gets its most concrete interpretation. The finite, from which the start is nowmade, is the real ethical self− consciousness. The negation through which that consciousness raises its spiritto its truth, is the purification, actually accomplished in the ethical world, whereby its conscience is purged ofsubjective opinion and its will freed from the selfishness of desire. Genuine religion and genuine religiosityonly issue from the moral life: religion is that life rising to think, i.e. becoming aware of the free universalityof its concrete essence. Only from the moral life and by the moral life is the Idea of God seen to be free spirit:outside the ethical spirit therefore it is vain to seek for true religion and religiosity.

But − as is the case with all speculative process − this development of one thing out of another means thatwhat appears as sequel and derivative is rather the absolute prius of what it appears to be mediated by, andhere in mind is also known as its truth.

Here then is the place to go more deeply into the reciprocal relations between the state and religion, and indoing so to elucidate the terminology which is familiar and current on the topic. It is evident and apparentfrom what has preceded that moral life is the state retracted into its inner heart and substance, while the stateis the organization and actualization of moral life; and that religion is the very substance of the moral lifeitself and of the state. At this rate, the state rests on the ethical sentiment, and that on the religious. If religionthen is the consciousness of 'absolute' truth, then whatever is to rank as right and justice, as law and duty, i.e.as true in the world of free will, can be so esteemed only as it is participant in that truth, as it is subsumedunder it and is its sequel. But if the truly moral life is to be a sequel of religion, then perforce religion musthave the genuine content; i.e. the idea of God it knows must be the true and real. The ethical life is the divinespirit as indwelling in self−consciousness, as it is actually present in a nation and its individual members.This self−consciousness retiring upon itself out of its empirical actuality and bringing its truth toconsciousness has, in its faith and in its conscience, only what it has consciously secured in its spiritualactuality. The two are inseparable: there cannot be two kinds of conscience, one religious and another ethical,differing from the former in body and value of truth. But in point of form, i.e. for thought and knowledge −(and religion and ethical life belong to intelligence and are a thinking and knowing) − the body of religioustruth, as the pure self−subsisting and therefore supreme truth, exercises a sanction over the moral life whichlies in empirical actuality. Thus for self−consciousness religion is the 'basis' of moral life and of the state. Ithas been the monstrous blunder of our times to try to look upon these inseparables as separable from oneanother, and even as mutually indifferent. The view taken of the relationship of religion and the state hasbeen that, whereas the state had an independent existence of its own, springing from some force and power,religion was a later addition, something desirable perhaps for strengthening the political bulwarks, but purelysubjective in individuals: − or it may be, religion is treated as something without effect on the moral life ofthe state, i.e. its reasonable law and constitution which are based on a ground of their own.

As the inseparability of the two sides has been indicated, it may be worth while to note the separation as itappears on the side of religion. It is primarily a point of form: the attitude which self−consciousness takes tothe body of truth. So long as this body of truth is the very substance or indwelling spirit of self−consciousness

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in its actuality, then self−consciousness in this content has the certainty of itself and is free. But if this presentself−consciousness is lacking, then there may be created, in point of form, a condition of spiritual slavery,even though the implicit content of religion is absolute spirit. This great difference (to cite a specific case)comes out within the Christian religion itself, even though here it is not the nature−element in which the ideaof God is embodied, and though nothing of the sort even enters as a factor into its central dogma and soletheme of a God who is known in spirit and in truth. And yet in Catholicism this spirit of all truth is inactuality set in rigid opposition to the self−conscious spirit. And, first of all, God is in the 'host' presented toreligious adoration as an external thing. (In the Lutheran Church, on the contrary, the host as such is not atfirst consecrated, but in the moment of enjoyment, i.e. in the annihilation of its externality. and in the act offaith, i.e. in the free self−certain spirit: only then is it consecrated and exalted to be present God.) From thatfirst and supreme status of externalization flows every other phase of externality − of bondage,non−spirituality, and superstition. It leads to a laity, receiving its knowledge of divine truth, as well as thedirection of its will and conscience from without and from another order − which order again does not getpossession of that knowledge in a spiritual way only, but to that end essentially requires an externalconsecration. It leads to the non−spiritual style of praying − partly as mere moving of the lips, partly in theway that the subject foregoes his right of directly addressing God, and prays others to pray − addressing hisdevotion to miracle− working images, even to bones, and expecting miracles from them. It leads, generally,to justification by external works, a merit which is supposed to be gained by acts, and even to be capable ofbeing transferred to others. All this binds the spirit under an externalism by which the very meaning of spiritis perverted and misconceived at its source, and law and justice, morality and conscience, responsibility andduty are corrupted at their root.

Along with this principle of spiritual bondage, and these applications of it in the religious life, there can onlygo in the legislative and constitutional system a legal and moral bondage, and a state of lawlessness andimmorality in political life. Catholicism has been loudly praised and is still often praised − logically enough −as the one religion which secures the stability of governments. But in reality this applies only to governmentswhich are bound up with institutions founded on the bondage of the spirit (of that spirit which should havelegal and moral liberty), i.e. with institutions that embody injustice and with a morally corrupt and barbaricstate of society. But these governments are not aware that in fanaticism they have a terrible power, whichdoes not rise in hostility against them, only so long as and only on condition that they remain sunk in thethraldom of injustice and immorality. But in mind there is a very different power available against thatexternalism and dismemberment induced by a false religion. Mind collects itself into its inward free actuality.Philosophy awakes in the spirit of governments and nations the wisdom to discern what is essentially andactually right and reasonable in the real world. It was well to call these products of thought, and in a specialsense Philosophy, the wisdom of the world;(10) for thought makes the spirit's truth an actual present, leads itinto the real world, and thus liberates it in its actuality and in its own self.

Thus set free, the content of religion assumes quite another shape. So long as the form, i.e. our consciousnessand subjectivity, lacked liberty, it followed necessarily that self−consciousness was conceived as notimmanent in the ethical principles which religion embodies, and these principles were set at such a distanceas to seem to have true being only as negative to actual self−consciousness. In this unreality ethical contentgets the name of Holiness. But once the divine spirit introduces itself into actuality, and actuality emancipatesitself to spirit, then what in the world was a postulate of holiness is supplanted by the actuality of moral life.Instead of the vow of chastity, marriage now ranks as the ethical relation; and, therefore, as the highest onthis side of humanity stands the family. Instead of the vow of poverty (muddled up into a contradiction ofassigning merit to whosoever gives away goods to the poor, i.e. whosoever enriches them) is the precept ofaction to acquire goods through one's own intelligence and industry, − of honesty in commercial dealing, andin the use of property − in short moral life in the socioeconomic sphere. And instead of the vow of obedience,true religion sanctions obedience to the law and the legal arrangements of the state − an obedience which isitself the true freedom, because the state is a self−possessed, self−realizing reason − in short, moral life in thestate. Thus, and thus only, can law and morality exist. The precept of religion, 'Give to Caesar what is

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Caesar's and to God what is God's' is not enough: the question is to settle what is Caesar's, what belongs tothe secular authority: and it is sufficiently notorious that the secular no less than the ecclesiastical authorityhave claimed almost everything as their own. The divine spirit must interpenetrate the entire secular life:whereby wisdom is concrete within it, and it carries the terms of its own justification. But that concreteindwelling is only the aforesaid ethical organizations. It is the morality of marriage as against the sanctity of acelibate order; − the morality of economic and industrial action against the sanctity of poverty and itsindolence; − the morality of an obedience dedicated to the law of the state as against the sanctity of anobedience from which law and duty are absent and where conscience is enslaved. With the growing need forlaw and morality and the sense of the spirit's essential liberty, there sets in a conflict of spirit with the religionof unfreedom. It is no use to organize political laws and arrangements on principles of equity and reason, solong as in religion the principle of unfreedom is not abandoned. A free state and a slavish religion areincompatible. It is silly to suppose that we may try to allot them separate spheres, under the impression thattheir diverse natures will maintain an attitude of tranquillity one to another and not break out in contradictionand battle. Principles of civil freedom can be but abstract and superficial, and political institutions deducedfrom them must be, if taken alone, untenable, so long as those principles in their wisdom mistake religion somuch as not to know that the maxims of the reason in actuality have their last and supreme sanction in thereligious conscience in subsumption under the consciousness of 'absolute' truth. Let us suppose even that, nomatter how, a code of law should arise, so to speak a priori, founded on principles of reason, but incontradiction with an established religion based on principles of spiritual unfreedom; still, as the duty ofcarrying out the laws lies in the hands of individual members of the government, and of the various classes ofthe administrative personnel, it is vain to delude ourselves with the abstract and empty assumption that theindividuals will act only according to the letter or meaning of the law, and not in the spirit of their religionwhere their inmost conscience and supreme obligation lies. Opposed to what religion pronounces holy, thelaws appear something made by human hands: even though backed by penalties and externally introduced,they could offer no lasting resistance to the contradictions and attacks of the religious spirit. Such laws,however sound their provisions may be, thus founder on the conscience, whose spirit is different from thespirit of the laws and refuses to sanction them. It is nothing but a modern folly to try to alter a corrupt moralorganization by altering its political constitution and code of laws without changing the religion, − to make arevolution without having made a reformation, to suppose that a political constitution opposed to the oldreligion could live in peace and harmony with it and its sanctities, and that stability could be procured for thelaws by external guarantees, e.g., so−called 'chambers', and the power given them to fix the budget, etc. (cf. ¤544 note). At best it is only a temporary expedient − when it is obviously too great a task to descend into thedepths of the religious spirit and to raise that same spirit to its truth − to seek to separate law and justice fromreligion. Those guarantees are but rotten bulwarks against the consciences of the persons charged withadministering the laws − among which laws these guarantees are included. It is indeed the height andprofanity of contradiction to seek to bind and subject to the secular code the religious conscience to whichmere human law is a thing profane.

The perception had dawned upon Plato with great clearness of the gulf which in his day had commenced todivide the established religion and the political constitution, on one hand, from those deeper requirementswhich, on the other hand, were made upon religion and politics by liberty which had learnt to recognize itsinner life. Plato gets hold of the thought that a genuine constitution and a sound political life have theirdeeper foundation on the Idea − on the essentially and actually universal and genuine principles of eternalrighteousness. Now to see and ascertain what these are is certainly the function and the business ofphilosophy. It is from this point of view that Plato breaks out into the celebrated or notorious passage wherehe makes Socrates emphatically state that philosophy and political power must coincide, that the Idea must beregent, if the distress of nations is to see its end. What Plato thus definitely set before his mind was that theIdea − which implicitly indeed is the free self−determining thought − could not get into consciousness saveonly in the form of a thought; that the substance of the thought could only be true when set forth as auniversal, and as such brought to consciousness under its most abstract form.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


To compare the Platonic standpoint in all its definiteness with the point of view from which the relationshipof state and religion is here regarded, the notional differences on which everything turns must be recalled tomind. The first of these is that in natural things their substance or genus is different from their existence inwhich that substance is as subject: further that this subjective existence of the genus is distinct from thatwhich it gets, when specially set in relief as genus, or, to put it simply, as the universal in a mental concept oridea. This additional 'individuality' − the soil on which the universal and underlying principle freely andexpressly exists − is the intellectual and thinking self. In the case of natural things their truth and reality doesnot get the form of universality and essentiality through themselves, and their 'individuality' is not itself theform: the form is only found in subjective thinking, which in philosophy gives that universal truth and realityan existence of its own. In man's case it is otherwise: his truth and reality is the free mind itself, and it comesto existence in his self−consciousness. This absolute nucleus of man − mind intrinsically concrete − is justthis − to have the form (to have thinking) itself for a content. To the height of the thinking consciousness ofthis principle Aristotle ascended in his notion of the entelechy of thought, thus surmounting the Platonic Idea(the genus, or essential being). But thought always − and that on account of this very principle − contains theimmediate self−subsistence of subjectivity no less than it contains universality; the genuine Idea of theintrinsically concrete mind is just as essentially under the one of its terms (subjective consciousness) as underthe other (universality): and in the one as in the other it is the same substantial content. Under the subjectiveform, however, fall feeling, intuition, pictorial representation; and it is in fact necessary that in point of timethe consciousness of the absolute Idea should be first reached and apprehended in this form: in other words, itmust exist in its immediate reality as religion, earlier than it does as philosophy. Philosophy is a laterdevelopment from this basis (just as Greek philosophy itself is later than Greek religion), and in fact reachesits completion by catching and comprehending in all its definite essentiality that principle of spirit which firstmanifests itself in religion. But Greek philosophy could set itself up only in opposition to Greek religion: theunity of thought and the substantiality of the Idea could take up none but a hostile attitude to an imaginativepolytheism, and to the gladsome and frivolous humours of its poetic creations. The form in its infinite truth,the subjectivity of mind, broke forth at first only as a subjective free thinking, which was not yet identicalwith the substantiality itself − and thus this underlying principle was not yet apprehended as absolute mind.Thus religion might appear as first purified only through philosophy − through pure self−existent thought: butthe form pervading this underlying principle − the form which philosophy attacked − was that creativeimagination.

Political power, which is developed similarly, but earlier than philosophy, from religion. exhibits theone−sidedness, which in the actual world may infect its implicitly true Idea, as demoralization. Plato, incommon with all his thinking contemporaries, perceived this demoralization of democracy and thedefectiveness even of its principle; he set in relief accordingly the underlying principle of the state, but couldnot work into his idea of it the infinite form of subjectivity, which still escaped his intelligence. His state istherefore, on its own showing, wanting in subjective liberty (¤ 503 note, ¤ 513, etc.). The truth which shouldbe immanent in the state, should knit it together and control it, he, for these reasons, got hold of only in theform of thought−out truth, of philosophy; and hence he makes that utterance that 'so long as philosophers donot rule in the states, or those who are now called kings and rulers do not soundly and comprehensivelyphilosophize, so long neither the state nor the race of men can be liberated from evils − so long will the ideaof the political constitution fall short of possibility and not see the light of the sun'. It was not vouchsafed toPlato to go on so far as to say that so long as true religion did not spring up in the world and hold away inpolitical life, so long the genuine principle of the state had not come into actuality. But so long too thisprinciple could not emerge even in thought, nor could thought lay hold of the genuine idea of the state − theidea of the substantial moral life, with which is identical the liberty of an independent self−consciousness.Only in the principle of mind, which is aware of its own essence, is implicitly in absolute liberty, and has itsactuality in the act of self−liberation, does the absolute possibility and necessity exist for political power,religion, and the principles of philosophy coinciding in one, and for accomplishing the reconciliation ofactuality in general with the mind, of the state with the religious conscience as well as with the philosophicalconsciousness. Self−realizing subjectivity is in this case absolutely identical with substantial universality.

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND


Hence religion as such, and the state as such − both as forms in which the principle exists − each contain theabsolute truth: so that the truth, in its philosophic phase, is after all only in one of its forms. But even religion,as it grows and expands, lets other aspects of the Idea of humanity grow and expand also (¤¤ 566 seqq.). As itleft therefore behind, in its first immediate, and so also one−sided phase, Religion may, or rather must, appearin its existence degraded to sensuous externality, and thus in the sequel become an influence to oppressliberty of spirit and to deprave political life. Still the principle has in it the infinite 'elasticity' of the 'absolute'form', so as to overcome this depraving of the form−determination (and the content by these means), and tobring about the reconciliation of the spirit in itself. Thus ultimately, in the Protestant conscience theprinciples of the religious and of the ethical conscience come to be one and the same: the free spirit learningto see itself in its reasonableness and truth. In the Protestant state, the constitution and the code, as well astheir several applications, embody the principle and the development of the moral life, which proceeds andcan only proceed from the truth of religion, when reinstated in its original principle and in that way as suchfirst become actual. The moral life of the state and the religious spirituality of the state are thus reciprocalguarantees of strength.

1. Die Sittlichkeit.

2. Die burgerliche Gesellschaft.

3. Das System der Bedurfnisse.

4. Die Rechtspflege

5. Gesetz.

6. Die Polizei und die Corporation.

7. Inneres Staatsrecht.

8. Das aussere Staatsrecht.

9. Die Weltgeschichte

10. Weltweisheit.

SECTION THREE: ABSOLUTE MIND(1)

¤ 553 The notion of mind has its reality in the mind. If this reality in identity with that notion is to exist as theconsciousness of the absolute Idea, then the necessary aspect is that the implicitly free intelligence be in itsactuality liberated to its notion, if that actuality is to be a vehicle worthy of it. The subjective and theobjective spirit are to be looked on as the road on which this aspect of reality or existence rises to maturity.

¤ 554 The absolute mind, while it is self−centred identity, is always also identity returning and ever returnedinto itself: if it is the one and universal substance it is so as a spirit, discerning itself into a self and aconsciousness, for which it is as substance. Religion, as this supreme sphere may be in general designated, ifit has on one hand to be studied as issuing from the subject and having its home in the subject, must no lessbe regarded as objectively issuing from the absolute spirit which as spirit is in its community.

That here, as always, belief or faith is not opposite to consciousness or knowledge, but rather to a sort ofknowledge, and that belief is only a particular form of the latter, has been remarked already (¤ 63 note). If

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nowadays there is so little consciousness of God, and his objective essence is so little dwelt upon, whilepeople speak so much more of the subjective side of religion, i.e. of God's indwelling in us, and if that andnot the truth as such is called for − in this there is at least the correct principle that God must be apprehendedas spirit in his community.

¤ 555 The subjective consciousness of the absolute spirit is essentially and intrinsically a process, theimmediate and substantial unity of which is the Belief in the witness of the spirit as the certainty of objectivetruth. Belief, at once this immediate unity and containing it as a reciprocal dependence of these differentterms, has in devotion − the implicit or more explicit act of worship (cultus) − passed over into the process ofsuperseding the contrast till it becomes spiritual liberation, the process of authenticating that first certainty bythis intermediation, and of gaining its concrete determination, viz. reconciliation, the actuality of the spirit.

1. Der absolute Geist.

A. ART

¤ 556 As this consciousness of the Absolute first takes shape, its immediacy produces the factor of finitude inArt. On one hand, that is, it breaks up into a work of external common existence, into the subject whichproduces that work, and the subject which contemplates and worships it. But, on the other hand, it is theconcrete contemplation and mental picture of implicitly absolute spirit as the Ideal. In this ideal, or theconcrete shape born of the subjective spirit, its natural immediacy, which is only a sign of the Idea, is sotransfigured by the informing spirit in order to express the Idea, that the figure shows it and it alone: − theshape or form of Beauty.

¤ 557 The sensuous externality attaching to the beautiful, − the form of immediacy as such − at the same timequalifies what it embodies: and the God (of art) has with his spirituality at the same time the stamp upon himof a natural medium or natural phase of existence − He contains the so−called unity of nature and spirit − i.e.the immediate unity in sensuously intuitional form − hence not the spiritual unity, in which the natural wouldbe put only as 'ideal', as superseded in spirit, and the spiritual content would be only in self−relation. It is notthe absolute spirit which enters this consciousness. On the subjective side the community has of course anethical life, aware, as it is, of the spirituality of its essence: and its self−consciousness and actuality are in itelevated to substantial liberty. But with the stigma of immediacy upon it, the subject's liberty is only amanner of life, without the infinite self−reflection and the subjective inwardness of conscience. Theseconsiderations govern in their further developments the devotion and the worship in the religion of fine art.

¤ 558 For the objects of contemplation it has to produce, Art requires not only an external given material −(under which are also included subjective images and ideas), but − for the expression of spiritual truth − mustuse the given forms of nature with a significance which art must divine and possess (cf. ¤ 411). Of all suchforms the human is the highest and the true, because only in it can the spirit have its corporeity and thus itsvisible expression.

This disposes of the principle of the imitation of nature in art: a point on which it is impossible to come to anunderstanding while a distinction is left thus abstract − in other words, so long as the natural is only taken inits externality, not as the 'characteristic' meaningful nature−form which is significant of spirit.

¤ 559 In such single shapes the 'absolute' mind cannot be made explicit: in and to art therefore the spirit is alimited natural spirit whose implicit universality, when steps are taken to specify its fullness in detail, breaksup into an indeterminate polytheism. With the essential restrictedness of its content, Beauty in general goesno further than a penetration of the vision or image by the spiritual principle − something formal, so that thethought embodied, or the idea, can, like the material which it uses to work in, be of the most diverse and

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unessential kind, and still the work be something beautiful and a work of art.

¤ 560 The one−sidedness of immediacy on the part of the Ideal involves the opposite one−sidedness (¤ 556)that it is something made by the artist. The subject or agent is the mere technical activity: and the work of artis only then an expression of the God, when there is no sign of subjective particularity in it, and the net powerof the indwelling spirit is conceived and born into the world, without admixture and unspotted from itscontingency. But as liberty only goes as far as there is thought, the action inspired with the fullness of thisindwelling power, the artist's enthusiasm, is like a foreign force under which he is bound and passive; theartistic production has on its part the form of natural immediacy, it belongs to the genius or particularendowment of the artist − and is at the same time a labour concerned with technical cleverness andmechanical externalities. The work of art therefore is just as much a work due to free option, and the artist isthe master of the God.

¤ 561 In work so inspired the reconciliation appears so obvious in its initial stage that it is without more adoaccomplished in the subjective self−consciousness, which is thus self−confident and of good cheer, withoutthe depth and without the sense of its antithesis to the absolute essence. On the further side of the perfection(which is reached in such reconciliation, in the beauty of classical art) lies the art of sublimity − symbolic art,in which the figuration suitable to the Idea is not yet found, and the thought as going forth and wrestling withthe figure is exhibited as a negative attitude to it, and yet all the while toiling to work itself into it. Themeaning or theme thus shows it has not yet reached the infinite form, is not yet known, not yet conscious ofitself, as free spirit. The artist's theme only is as the abstract God of pure thought, or an effort towards him − arestless and unappeased effort which throws itself into shape after shape as it vainly tries to find its goal.

¤ 562 In another way the Idea and the sensuous figure it appears in are incompatible; and that is where theinfinite form, subjectivity, is not as in the first extreme a mere superficial personality, but its inmost depth,and God is known not as only seeking his form or satisfying himself in an external form, but as only findinghimself in himself, and thus giving himself his adequate figure in the spiritual world alone. Romantic artgives up the task of showing him as such in external form and by means of beauty: it presents him as onlycondescending to appearance, and the divine as the heart of hearts in an externality from which it alwaysdisengages itself. Thus the external can here appear as contingent towards its significance.

The Philosophy of Religion has to discover the logical necessity in the progress by which the Being, knownas the Absolute, assumes fuller and firmer features; it has to note to what particular feature the kind of cultuscorresponds − and then to see how the secular self−consciousness, the consciousness of what is the supremevocation of man − in short how the nature of a nation's moral life, the principle of its law, of its actual liberty,and of its constitution, as well as of its art and science, corresponds to the principle which constitutes thesubstance of a religion. That all these elements of a nation's actuality constitute one systematic totality, thatone spirit creates and informs them, is a truth on which follows the further truth that the history of religionscoincides with the world−history.

As regards the close connection of art with the various religions it may be specially noted that beautiful artcan only belong to those religions in which the spiritual principle, though concrete and intrinsically free, isnot yet absolute. In religions where the Idea has not yet been revealed and known in its free character, thoughthe craving for art is felt in order to bring in imaginative visibility to consciousness the idea of the supremebeing, and though art is the sole organ in which the abstract and radically indistinct content − a mixture fromnatural and spiritual sources − can try to bring itself to consciousness; − still this art is defective; its form isdefective because its subject−matter and theme is so − for the defect in subject−matter comes from the formnot being immanent in it. The representations of this symbolic art keep a certain tastelessness and stolidity −for the principle it embodies is itself stolid and dull, and hence has not the power freely to transmute theexternal to significance and shape. Beautiful art, on the contrary, has for its condition the self−consciousnessof the free spirit − the consciousness that compared with it the natural and sensuous has no standing of its

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own: it makes the natural wholly into the mere expression of spirit, which is thus the inner form that givesutterance to itself alone.

But with a further and deeper study, we see that the advent of art, in a religion still in the bonds of sensuousexternality, shows that such religion is on the decline. At the very time it seems to give religion the supremeglorification, expression, and brilliancy, it has lifted the religion away over its limitation. In the sublimedivinity to which the work of art succeeds in giving expression the artistic genius and the, spectator findthemselves at home, with their personal sense and feeling, satisfied and liberated: to them the vision and theconsciousness of free spirit has been vouchsafed and attained. Beautiful art, from its side, has thus performedthe same service as philosophy: it has purified the spirit from its thraldom. The older religion in which theneed of fine art, and just for that reason, is first generated, looks up in its principle to an other−world which issensuous and unmeaning: the images adored by its devotees are hideous idols regarded as wonder−workingtalismans, which point to the unspiritual objectivity of that other−world − and bones perform a similar oreven a better service than such images. But even fine art is only a grade of liberation, not the supremeliberation itself. − The genuine objectivity, which is only in the medium of thought − the medium in whichalone the pure spirit is for the spirit, and where the liberation is accompanied with reverence − is still absentin the sensuous beauty of the work of art, still more in that external, unbeautiful sensuousness.

¤ 563 Beautiful Art, like the religion peculiar to it, has its future in true religion. The restricted value of theIdea passes utterly and naturally into the universality identical with the infinite form; − the vision in whichconsciousness has to depend upon the senses passes into a self−mediating knowledge, into an existencewhich is itself knowledge − into revelation. Thus the principle which gives the Idea its content is that itembody free intelligence, and as 'absolute' spirit it is for the spirit.

B. REVEALED RELIGION(1)

¤ 564 It lies essentially in the notion of religion, − the religion i.e. whose content is absolute mind − that it berevealed, and, what is more, revealed by God. Knowledge (the principle by which the substance is mind) is aself−determining principle, as infinite self−realizing form − it therefore is manifestation out and out. Thespirit is only spirit in so far as it is for the spirit, and in the absolute religion it is the absolute spirit whichmanifests no longer abstract elements of its being but itself.

The old conception − due to a one−sided survey of human life − of Nemesis, which made the divinity and itsaction in the world only a levelling power, dashing to pieces everything high and great − was confronted byPlato and Aristotle with the doctrine that God is not envious. The same answer may be given to the modemassertions that man cannot ascertain God. These assertions (and more than assertions they are not) are themore illogical, because made within a religion which is expressly called the revealed; for according to them itwould rather be the religion in which nothing of God was revealed, in which he had not revealed himself, andthose belonging to it would be the heathen 'who know not God'. If the word 'God' is taken in earnest inreligion at all, it is from Him, the theme and centre of religion, that the method of divine knowledge may andmust begin: and if self−revelation is refused Him, then the only thing left to constitute His nature would be toascribe envy to Him.. But clearly if the word 'Mind' is to have a meaning, it implies the revelation of Him.

If we recollect how intricate is the knowledge of the divine Mind for those who are not content with thehomely pictures of faith but proceed to thought − at first only 'rationalizing' reflection, but afterwards, as induty bound, to speculative comprehension, it may almost create surprise that so many, and especiallytheologians whose vocation it is to deal with these Ideas, have tried to get off their task by gladly acceptinganything offered them for this behoof. And nothing serves better to shirk it than to adopt the conclusion thatman knows nothing of God. To know what God as spirit is − to apprehend this accurately and distinctly inthoughts − requires careful and thorough speculation. It includes, in its forefront, the propositions: God is

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God only so far as he knows him−self: his self−knowledge is, further, a self−consciousness in man and man'sknowledge of God, which proceeds to man's self− knowledge in God. − See the profound elucidation of thesepropositions in the work from which they are taken: Aphorisms on Knowing and Not−knowing, by C. F. G −1.: Berlin 1829.

¤ 565 When the immediacy and sensuousness of shape and knowledge is superseded, God is, in point ofcontent, the essential and actual spirit of nature and spirit, while in point of form he is, first of all, presentedto consciousness as a mental representation. This quasi−pictorial representation gives to the elements of hiscontent, on one hand, a separate being, making them presuppositions towards each other, and phenomenawhich succeed each other; their relationship it makes a series of events according to finite reflectivecategories. But, on the other hand, such a form of finite representationalism is also overcome and supersededin the faith which realizes one spirit and in the devotion of worship.

¤ 566 In this separating, the form parts from the content: and in the form the different functions of the notionpart off into special spheres or media, in each of which the absolute spirit exhibits itself; (a) as eternalcontent, abiding self−centred, even in its manifestation; (b) as distinction of the eternal essence from itsmanifestation, which by this difference becomes the phenomenal world into which the content enters; (c) asinfinite return, and reconciliation with the eternal being, of the world it gave away − the withdrawal of theeternal from the phenomenal into the unity of its fullness.

¤ 567 (A) Under the 'moment' of Universality − the sphere of pure thought or the abstract medium of essence− it is therefore the absolute spirit, which is at first the presupposed principle, not, however, staying aloof andinert, but (as underlying and essential power under the reflective category of causality) creator of heaven andearth: but yet in this eternal sphere rather only begetting himself as his son, with whom, though different, hestill remains in original identity − just as, again, this differentiation of him from the universal essenceeternally supersedes itself, and, through this mediating of a self−superseding mediation, the first substance isessentially as concrete individuality and subjectivity − is the Spirit.

¤ 568 Under the 'moment' of particularity, or of judgement, it is this concrete eternal being which ispresupposed.− its movement is the creation of the phenomenal world. The eternal 'moment' of mediation − ofthe only Son − divides itself to become the antithesis of two separate worlds. On one hand is heaven andearth, the elemental and the concrete nature − on the other hand, standing in action and reaction with suchnature, the spirit, which therefore is finite. That spirit, as the extreme of inherent negativity, completes itsindependence till it becomes wickedness, and is that extreme through its connection with a confronting natureand through its own naturalness thereby investing it. Yet, amid that naturalness, it is, when it thinks, directedtowards the Eternal, though, for that reason, only standing to it in an external connection.

¤ 569 (c) Under the 'moment' of individuality as such − of subjectivity and the notion itself, in which thecontrast of universal and particular has sunk to its identical ground, the place of presupposition (1) is taken bythe universal substance, as actualized out of its abstraction into an individual self−consciousness. Thisindividual, who as such is identified with the essence − (in the Eternal sphere he is called the Son) − istransplanted into the world of time, and in him wickedness is implicitly overcome. Further, this immediate,and thus sensuous, existence of the absolutely concrete is represented as putting himself in judgement andexpiring in the pain of negativity, in which he, as infinite subjectivity, keeps himself unchanged, and thus, asabsolute return from that negativity and as universal unity of universal and individual essentiality, hasrealized his being as the Idea of the spirit, eternal, but alive and present in the world.

¤ 570 (2) This objective totality of the divine man who is the Idea of the spirit is the implicit presuppositionfor the finite immediacy of the single subject. For such subject therefore it is at first an Other, an object ofcontemplating vision − but the vision of implicit truth, through which witness of the spirit in him, he, onaccount of his immediate nature, at first characterized himself as nought and wicked. But, secondly, after the

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example of his truth, by means of the faith on the unity (in that example implicitly accomplished) of universaland individual essence, he is also the movement to throw off his immediacy, his natural man and self−will, toclose himself in unity with that example (who is his implicit life) in the pain of negativity, and thus to knowhimself made one with the essential Being. Thus the Being of Beings (3) through this mediation brings aboutits own indwelling in self−consciousness, and is the actual presence of the essential and self−subsisting spiritwho is all in all.

¤ 571 These three syllogisms, constituting the one syllogism of the absolute self−mediation of spirit, are therevelation of that spirit whose life is set out as a cycle of concrete shapes in pictorial thought. From this itsseparation into parts, with a temporal and external sequence, the unfolding of the mediation contracts itself inthe result − where the spirit closes in unity with itself − not merely to the simplicity of faith and devotionalfeeling, but even to thought. In the immanent simplicity of thought the unfolding still has its expansion, yet isall the while known as an indivisible coherence of the universal, simple, and eternal spirit in itself. In thisform of truth, truth is the object of philosophy.

If the result − the realized Spirit in which all mediation has superseded itself − is taken in a merely formal,contentless sense, so that the spirit is not also at the same time known as implicitly existent and objectivelyself−unfolding; − then that infinite subjectivity is the merely formal self−consciousness, knowing itself initself as absolute − Irony. Irony, which can make every objective reality nought and vain, is itself theemptiness and vanity, which from itself, and therefore by chance and its own good pleasure, gives itselfdirection and content, remains master over it, is not bound by it − and, with the assertion that it stands on thevery summit of religion and philosophy, falls back rather into the vanity of wilfulness. It is only in proportionas the pure infinite form, the self−centred manifestation, throws off the one−sidedness of subjectivity inwhich it is the vanity of thought, that it is the free thought which has its infinite characteristic at the sametime as essential and actual content, and has that content as an object in which it is also free. Thinking, so far,is only the formal aspect of the absolute content.

1. Die geoffenbarte Religion.

C. PHILOSOPHY

¤ 572 This science is the unity of Art and Religion. Whereas the vision−method of Art, external in point ofform, is but subjective production and shivers the substantial content into many separate shapes, and whereasReligion, with its separation into parts, opens it out in mental picture, and mediates what is thus opened out;Philosophy not merely keeps them together to make a totality, but even unifies them into the simple spiritualvision, and then in that raises them to self−conscious thought. Such consciousness is thus the intelligibleunity (cognized by thought) of art and religion, in which the diverse elements in the content are cognized asnecessary, and this necessary as free.

¤ 573 Philosophy thus characterizes itself as a cognition of the necessity in the content of the absolutepicture−idea, as also of the necessity in the two forms − on one hand, immediate vision and its poetry, and theobjective and external revelation presupposed by representation − on the other hand, first the subjectiveretreat inwards, then the subjective movement of faith and its final identification with the presupposed object.This cognition is thus the recognition of this content and its form; it is the liberation from the one−sidednessof the forms, elevation of them into the absolute form, which determines itself to content, remains identicalwith it, and is in that the cognition of that essential and actual necessity. This movement, which philosophyis, finds itself already accomplished, when at the close it seizes its own notion − i.e. only looks back on itsknowledge.

Here might seem to be the place to treat in a definite exposition of the reciprocal relations of philosophy and

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religion. The whole question turns entirely on the difference of the forms of speculative thought from theforms of mental representation and 'reflecting' intellect. But it is the whole cycle of philosophy, and of logicin particular, which has not merely taught and made known this difference, but also criticized it, or rather haslet its nature develop and judge itself by these very categories. It is only by an insight into the value of theseforms that the true and needful conviction can be gained, that the content of religion and philosophy is thesame − leaving out, of course, the further details of external nature and finite mind which fall outside therange of religion. But religion is the truth for all men: faith rests on the witness of the spirit, which aswitnessing is the spirit in man. This witness − the underlying essence in all humanity − takes, when driven toexpound itself, its first definite form under those acquired habits of thought which his secular consciousnessand intellect otherwise employs. In this way the truth becomes liable to the terms and conditions of finitudein general. This does not prevent the spirit, even in employing sensuous ideas and finite categories of thought,from retaining its content (which as religion is essentially speculative) with a tenacity which does violence tothem, and acts inconsistently towards them. By this inconsistency it corrects their defects. Nothing easiertherefore for the 'Rationalist' than to point out contradictions in the exposition of the faith, and then to preparetriumphs for its principle of formal identity. If the spirit yields to this finite reflection, which has usurped thetitle of reason and philosophy − ('Rationalism') − it strips religious truth of its infinity and makes it in realitynought. Religion in that case is completely in the right in guarding herself against such reason and philosophyand treating them as enemies. But it is another thing when religion sets herself against comprehending reason,and against philosophy in general, and specially against a philosophy of which the doctrine is speculative,and so religious. Such an opposition proceeds from failure to appreciate the difference indicated and the valueof spiritual form in general, and particularly of the logical form; or, to be more precise still, from failure tonote the distinction of the content − which may be in both the same − from these forms. It is on the ground ofform that philosophy has been reproached and accused by the religious party; just as conversely itsspeculative content has brought the same changes upon it from a self−styled philosophy − and from a pithlessorthodoxy. It had too little of God in it for the former; too much for the latter.

The charge of Atheism, which used often to be brought against philosophy (that it has too little of God), hasgrown rare: the more wide−spread grows the charge of Pantheism, that it has too much of him: − so much so,that it is treated not so much as an imputation, but as a proved fact, or a sheer fact which needs no proof.Piety, in particular, which with its pious airs of superiority fancies itself free to dispense with proof, goeshand in hand with empty rationalism − (which means to be so much opposed to it, though both repose reallyon the same habit of mind) − in the wanton assertion, almost as if it merely mentioned a notorious fact, thatPhilosophy is the All−one doctrine, or Pantheism. It must be said that it was more to the credit of piety andtheology when they accused a philosophical system (e.g. Spinozism) of Atheism than of Pantheism, thoughthe former imputation at the first glance looks more cruel and invidious (cf. ¤ 71 note). The imputation ofAtheism presupposes a definite idea of a full and real God, and arises because the popular idea does notdetect in the philosophical notion the peculiar form to which it is attached. Philosophy indeed can recognizeits own forms in the categories of religious consciousness, and even its own teaching in the doctrine ofreligion − which therefore it does not disparage. But the converse is not true: the religious consciousness doesnot apply the criticism of thought to itself, does not comprehend itself, and is therefore, as it stands,exclusive. To impute Pantheism instead of Atheism to Philosophy is part of the modern habit of mind − of thenew piety and new theology. For them philosophy has too much of God: − so much so, that, if we believethem, it asserts that God is everything and everything is God. This new theology, which makes religion onlya subjective feeling and denies the knowledge of the divine nature, thus retains nothing more than a God ingeneral without objective characteristics. Without interest of its own for the concrete, fulfilled notion of God,it treats it only as an interest which others once had, and hence treats what belongs to the doctrine of God'sconcrete nature as something merely historical. The indeterminate God is to be found in all religions; everykind of piety (¤ 72) − that of the Hindu to asses, cows − or to dalai−lamas − that of the Egyptians to the ox −is always adoration of an object which, with all its absurdities, also contains the generic abstract, God inGeneral. If this theory needs no more than such a God, so as to find God in everything called religion, it mustat least find such a God recognized even in philosophy, and can no longer accuse it of Atheism. The

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mitigation of the reproach of Atheism into that of Pantheism has its ground therefore in the superficial idea towhich this mildness has attenuated and emptied God. As that popular idea clings to its abstract universality,from which all definite quality is excluded, all such definiteness is only the non−divine, the secularity ofthings, thus left standing in fixed undisturbed substantiality. On such a presupposition, even after philosophyhas maintained God's absolute universality, and the consequent untruth of the being of external things, thehearer clings as he did before to his belief that secular things still keep their being, and form all that isdefinite in the divine universality. He thus changes that universality into what he calls the pantheistic: −Everything is − (empirical things, without distinction, whether higher or lower in the scale, are) − all possesssubstantiality; and so − thus he understands philosophy − each and every secular thing is God. It is only hisown stupidity, and the falsifications due to such misconception, which generate than imagination and theallegation of such pantheism.

But if those who give out that a certain philosophy is Pantheism, are unable and unwilling to see this − for itis just to see the notion that they refuse − they should before everything have verified the alleged fact that anyone philosopher, or any one man, had really ascribed substantial or objective and inherent reality to all thingsand regarded them as God: − that such an idea had ever come into the head of anybody but themselves. Thisallegation I will further elucidate in this exoteric discussion: and the only way to do so is to set down theevidence. If we want to take so−called Pantheism in its most poetical, most sublime, or if you will, itsgrossest shape, we must, as is well known, consult the oriental poets: and the most copious delineations of itare found in Hindu literature. Amongst the abundant resources, open to our disposal on this topic, I select −as the most authentic statement accessible − the Bhagavat−Gita, and amongst its effusions, prolix andreiterative ad nauseam, some of the most telling passages. In the 10th Lesson (in Schlegel, p. 162) Krishnasays of himself:(1) − 'I am the self, seated in the hearts of all beings. I am the beginning and the middle andthe end also of all beings . . . I am the beaming sun amongst the shining ones, and the moon among the lunarmansions.... Amongst the Vedas I am the Sama−Veda: I am mind amongst the senses: I am consciousness inliving beings. And I am Sankara (Siva) among the Rudras, . . . Meru among the high−topped mountains. . . .the Himalaya among the firmly−fixed (mountains). . . . Among beasts I am the lord of beasts. . . . Amongletters I am the letter A. . . . I am the spring among the seasons. . . . I am also that which is the seed of allthings: there is nothing moveable or immoveable which can exist without me.'

Even in these totally sensuous delineations, Krishna (and we must not suppose there is, besides Krishna, stillGod, or a God besides; as he said before he was Siva, or Indra, so it is afterwards said that Brahma too is inhim) makes himself out to be − not everything, but only − the most excellent of everything. Everywhere thereis a distinction drawn between external, unessential existences, and one essential amongst them, which he is.Even when, at the beginning of the passage, he is said to be the beginning, middle, and end of living things,this totality is distinguished from the living things themselves as single existences. Even such a picture whichextends deity far and wide in its existence cannot be called pantheism: we must rather say that in theinfinitely multiple empirical world, everything is reduced to a limited number of essential existences, to apolytheism. But even what has been quoted shows that these very substantialities of the externally existent donot retain the independence entitling them to be named Gods; even Siva, Indra, etc. melt into the one Krishna.

This reduction is more expressly made in the following scene (7th Lesson, pp. 7 seqq.). Krishna says: 'I amthe producer and the destroyer of the whole universe. There is nothing else higher than myself; all this iswoven upon me, like numbers of pearls upon a thread. I am the taste in water; . . . I am the light of the sunand the moon; I am "Om" in all the Vedas. . . . I am life in all beings. . . . I am the discernment of thediscerning ones. . . . I am also the strength of the strong.' Then he adds: 'The whole universe deluded by thesethree states of mind developed from the qualities [sc. goodness, passion, darkness] does not know me who ambeyond them and inexhaustible: for this delusion of mine (even the Maya is his, nothing independent],developed from the qualities is divine and difficult to transcend. Those cross beyond this delusion who resortto me alone.' Then the picture gathers itself up in a simple expression. 'At the end of many lives, the manpossessed of knowledge approaches me, (believing) that Vasudeva is everything. Such a high−souled mind is

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very hard to find. Those who are deprived of knowledge by various desires approach other divinities . . .Whichever form of deity one worships with faith, from it he obtains the beneficial things he desires reallygiven by me. But the fruit thus obtained by those of little judgement is perishable. . . . The undiscerning ones,not knowing my transcendent and inexhaustible essence, than which there is nothing higher, think me whoam unperceived to have become perceptible.'

This 'All', which Krishna calls himself, is not, any more than the Eleatic One, and the Spinozan Substance,the Everything. This everything, rather, the infinitely manifold sensuous manifold of the finite is in all thesepictures, but defined as the 'accidental', without essential being of its very own, but having its truth in thesubstance, the One which, as different from that accidental, is alone the divine and God. Hinduism, however,has the higher conception of Brahma, the pure unity of thought in itself, where the empirical everything of theworld, as also those proximate substantialities, called Gods, vanish. On that account Colebrooke and manyothers have described the Hindu religion as at bottom a Monotheism. That this description is not incorrect isclear from these short citations. But so little concrete is this divine unity − spiritual as its idea of God is − sopowerless its, grip, so to speak − that Hinduism, with a monstrous inconsistency, is also the maddest ofpolytheisms. But the idolatry of the wretched Hindu, when he adores the ape, or other creature, is still a longway from that wretched fancy of a Pantheism, to which everything is God, and God everything. Hindumonotheism, moreover, is itself an example how little comes of mere monotheism, if the Idea of God is notdeeply determinate in itself. For that unity, if it be intrinsically abstract and therefore empty, tends of itself tolet whatever is concrete, outside it − be it as a lot of Gods or as secular, empirical individuals − keep itsindependence. That pantheism indeed − on the shallow conception of it − might with a show of logic as wellbe called a monotheism: for if God, as it says, is identical with the world, then as there is only one worldthere would be in that pantheism only one God. Perhaps the empty numerical unity must be predicated of theworld: but such abstract predication of it has no further special interest; on the contrary, a mere numericalunity just means that its content is an infinite multeity and variety of finitudes. But it is that delusion with theempty unity, which alone makes possible and induces the wrong idea of pantheism. It is only the picture −floating in the indefinite blue − of the world as one thing, the all, that could ever be considered capable ofcombining with God: only on that assumption could philosophy be supposed to teach that God is the World:for if the world were taken as it is, as everything, as the endless lot of empirical existence, then it wouldhardly have been even held possible to suppose a pantheism which asserted of such stuff that it is God.

But to go back again to the question of fact. If we want to see the consciousness of the One − not as with theHindus split between the featureless unity of abstract thought, on one hand, and on the other, thelong−winded weary story of its particular detail, but − in its finest purity and sublimity, we must consult theMohammedans. If, e.g., in the excellent Jelaleddin−Rumi in particular, we find the unity of the soul with theOne set forth, and that unity described as love, this spiritual unity is an exaltation above the finite and vulgar,a transfiguration of the natural and the spiritual, in which the externalism and transitoriness of immediatenature, and of empirical secular spirit, is discarded and absorbed.(2)

I refrain from accumulating further examples of the religious and poetic conceptions which it is customary tocall pantheistic. Of the philosophies to which that name is given, the Eleatic, or Spinozist, it has beenremarked earlier (¤ 50, note) that so far are they from identifying God with the world and making him finite,that in these systems this 'everything' has no truth, and that we should rather call them monotheistic, or, inrelation to the popular idea of the world, acosmical. They are most accurately called systems whichapprehend the Absolute only as substance. Of the oriental, especially the Mohammedan, modes of envisagingGod, we may rather say that they represent the Absolute as the utterly universal genus which dwells in thespecies or existences, but dwells so potently that these existences have no actual reality. The fault of all thesemodes of thought and systems is that they stop short of defining substance as subject and as mind.

These systems and modes of pictorial conception originate from the one need common to all philosophies andall religions of getting an idea of God, and, secondly, of the relationship of God and the world. (In philosophy

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it is specially made out that the determination of God's nature determines his relations with the world.) The'reflective' understanding begins by rejecting all systems and modes of conception, which, whether theyspring from heart, imagination or speculation, express the interconnection of God and the world: and in orderto have God pure in faith or consciousness, he is as essence parted from appearance, as infinite from thefinite. But, after this partition, the conviction arises also that the appearance has a relation to the essence, thefinite to the infinite, and so on.− and thus arises the question of reflection as to the nature of this relation. It isin the reflective form that the whole difficulty of the affair lies, and that causes this relation to be calledincomprehensible by the agnostic. The close of philosophy is not the place, even in a general exotericdiscussion, to waste a word on what a 'notion' means. But as the view taken of this relation is closelyconnected with the view taken of philosophy generally and with all amputations against it, we may still addthe remark that though philosophy certainly has to do with unity in general, it is not, however, with abstractunity, mere identity, and the empty absolute, but with concrete unity (the notion), and that in its whole courseit has to do with nothing else; − that each step in its advance is a peculiar term or phase of this concrete unity,and that the deepest and last expression of unity is the unity of absolute mind itself. Would−be judges andcritics of philosophy might be recommended to familiarize themselves with these phases of unity and to takethe trouble to get acquainted with them, at least to know so much that of these terms there are a great many,and that amongst them there is great variety. But they show so little acquaintance with them − and still lesstake trouble about it − that, when they hear of unity − and relation ipso facto implies unity − they rather stickfast at quite abstract indeterminate unity, and lose sight of the chief point of interest − the special mode inwhich the unity is qualified. Hence all they can say about philosophy is that dry identity is its principle andresult, and that it is the system of identity. Sticking fast to the undigested thought of identity, they have laidhands on, not the concrete unity, the notion and content of philosophy, but rather its reverse. In thephilosophical field they proceed, as in the physical field the physicist; who also is well aware that he hasbefore him a variety of sensuous properties and matters − or usually matters alone (for the properties gettransformed into matters also for the physicist) − and that these matters (elements) also stand in relation toone another. But the question is, Of what kind is this relation? Every peculiarity and the whole difference ofnatural things, inorganic and living, depend solely on the different modes of this unity. But instead ofascertaining these different modes, the ordinary physicist (chemist included) takes up only one, the mostexternal and the worst, viz. composition, applies only it in the whole range of natural structures, which hethus renders for ever inexplicable.

The aforesaid shallow pantheism is an equally obvious inference from this shallow identity. All that thosewho employ this invention of their own to accuse philosophy gather from the study of God's relation to theworld is that the one, but only the one factor of this category of relation − and that the factor ofindeterminateness − is identity. Thereupon they stick fast in this half−perception, and assert − falsely as a fact− that philosophy teaches the identity of God and the world. And as in their judgement either of the two − theworld as much as God − has the same solid substantiality as the other, they infer that in the philosophic IdeaGod is composed of God and the world. Such then is the idea they form of pantheism, and which they ascribeto philosophy. Unaccustomed in their own thinking and apprehending of thoughts to go beyond suchcategories, they import them into philosophy, where they are utterly unknown; they thus infect it with thedisease against which they subsequently raise an outcry. If any difficulty emerge in comprehending God'srelation to the world, they at once and very easily escape it by admitting that this relation contains for them aninexplicable contradiction; and that hence, they must stop at the vague conception of such relation, perhapsunder the more familiar names of e.g. omnipresence, providence, etc. Faith in their use of the term means nomore than a refusal to define the conception, or to enter on a closer discussion of the problem. That men andclasses of untrained intellect are satisfied with such indefiniteness, is what one expects; but when a trainedintellect and an interest for reflective study is satisfied, in matters admitted to be of superior, if not even ofsupreme interest, with indefinite ideas, it is hard to decide whether the thinker is really in earnest with thesubject. But if those who cling to this crude 'rationalism' were in earnest, e.g. with God's omnipresence, so faras to realize their faith thereon in a definite mental idea, in what difficulties would they be involved by theirbelief in the true reality of the things of sense! They would hardly like, as Epicurus does, to let God dwell in

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the interspaces of things, i.e. in the pores of the physicists − said pores being the negative, somethingsupposed to exist beside the material reality. This very 'Beside' would give their pantheism its spatiality −their everything, conceived as the mutual exclusion of parts in space. But in ascribing to God, in his relationto the world, an action on and in the space thus filled on the world and in it, they would endlessly split up thedivine actuality into infinite materiality. They would really thus have the misconception they call pantheismor all−one−doctrine, only as the necessary sequel of their misconceptions of God and the world. But to putthat sort of thing, this stale gossip of oneness or identity, on the shoulders of philosophy, shows suchrecklessness about justice and truth that it can only be explained through the difficulty of getting into the headthoughts and notions, i.e. not abstract unity, but the many−shaped modes specified. If statements as to factsare put forward, and the facts in question are thoughts and notions, it is indispensable to get hold of theirmeaning. But even the fulfilment of this requirement has been rendered superfluous, now that it has long beena foregone conclusion that philosophy is pantheism, a system of identity, an All−one doctrine, and that theperson therefore who might be unaware of this fact is treated either as merely unaware of a matter of commonnotoriety, or as prevaricating for a purpose. On account of this chorus of assertions, then, I have believedmyself obliged to speak at more length and exoterically on the outward and inward untruth of this allegedfact: for exoteric discussion is the only method available in dealing with the external apprehension of notionsas mere facts − by which notions are perverted into their opposite. The esoteric study of God and identity, asof cognitions, and notions, is philosophy itself.

¤ 574 This notion of philosophy is the self−thinking Idea, the truth aware of itself (¤ 236) − the logicalsystem, but with the signification that it is universality approved and certified in concrete content as in itsactuality. In this way the science has gone back to its beginning: its result is the logical system but as aspiritual principle: out of the presupposing judgement, in which the notion was only implicit and thebeginning an immediate − and thus out of the appearance which it had there − it has risen into its pureprinciple and thus also into its proper medium.

¤ 575 It is this appearing which originally gives the motive of the further development. The first appearanceis formed by the syllogism, which is based on the Logical system as starting−point, with Nature for themiddle term which couples the Mind with it. The Logical principle turns to Nature and Nature to Mind.Nature, standing between the Mind and its essence, sunders itself, not indeed to extremes of finite abstraction,nor itself to something away from them and independent − which, as other than they, only serves as a linkbetween them: for the syllogism is in the Idea and Nature is essentially defined as a transition−point andnegative factor, and as implicitly the Idea. Still the mediation of the notion has the external form of transition,and the science of Nature presents itself as the course of necessity, so that it is only in the one extreme thatthe liberty of the notion is explicit as a self−amalgamation.

¤ 576 In the second syllogism this appearance is so far superseded, that that syllogism is the standpoint of theMind itself, which − as the mediating agent in the process − presupposes Nature and couples it with theLogical principle. It is the syllogism where Mind reflects on itself in the Idea: philosophy appears as asubjective cognition, of which liberty is the aim, and which is itself the way to produce it.

¤ 577 The third syllogism is the Idea of philosophy, which has self− knowing reason, the absolutelyuniversal, for its middle term: a middle, which divides itself into Mind and Nature, making the former itspresupposition, as process of the Idea's subjective activity, and the latter its universal extreme, as process ofthe objectively and implicitly existing Idea. The self−judging of the Idea into its two appearances (¤¤ 575,576) characterizes both as its (the self−knowing reason's) manifestations: and in it there is a unification of thetwo aspects: − it is the nature of the fact, the notion, which causes the movement and development, yet thissame movement is equally the action of cognition. The eternal Idea, in full fruition of its essence, eternallysets itself to work, engenders and enjoys itself as absolute Mind.

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hegel, georg - philosophy of mind

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